Odoo's chatter — the message, activity, and follower thread that lives on almost every form view — is fixed by the framework. On standard Odoo 17/18/19 it renders in a predetermined place relative to the form: a right-hand rail on wide screens, stacked below on narrow ones, with layout switching handled internally by the web client. For teams that live inside long forms all day — sales orders, manufacturing orders, project tasks, helpdesk tickets — that rigidity is a real friction. The chatter either eats horizontal space you'd rather give to the record, or it's buried below the fold where activity reminders and log notes get missed. Odoo core gives you no setting to move it, and pushing the panel around from the outside means fighting the OWL web client's own layout logic every time you upgrade.

Flexible Chatter is a module we build to order that gives you explicit control over where the chatter sits and how it behaves. Technically, it extends the FormRenderer/chatter mounting layer in the OWL web client and layers a preference model on top: a small models.Model stores per-user and per-model chatter placement (for example right, bottom, collapsed, or hidden), read at render time so each user sees their own layout without touching anyone else's. Placement can be resolved by a priority chain — user override first, then a model-level default set by an administrator, then a global fallback — so a power user on sale.order can keep the thread as a slide-out drawer while a casual user keeps it inline. We wire the preference writes through a lightweight controller/ORM call so the choice persists across sessions and devices, and we respect Odoo's existing access rules: the placement records are governed by ir.model.access.csv and record rules so a user can only read and write their own preferences.

Because this rides on the framework rather than hard-coding CSS overrides, it stays robust across the layouts Odoo already ships. We handle the responsive breakpoints (so a "right rail" gracefully becomes a bottom drawer on mobile), keep keyboard and accessibility behavior intact, and make sure the message composer, activity scheduler, follower management, and attachment previews all continue to work in the new position. The module carries a clean __manifest__.py with pinned dependencies, its OWL/QWeb template extensions are namespaced to avoid clashing with other studio or third-party customizations, and admin defaults are exposed through a normal settings view rather than requiring developer-mode edits. It works on Odoo Community and Enterprise; where Enterprise-only widgets change the chatter's surroundings we adapt the mounting logic accordingly, and we build and test against your exact edition and minor version.

Delivery is build-to-order: after a short scoping call we confirm which models the placement options apply to, which layout modes you want, and whether administrators or end users own the defaults, then we build against your target Odoo version (17.0, 18.0, or 19.0) and edition. Typical delivery is 2–4 weeks from confirmed scope, including UAT on a staging database, a rollback plan, and handover of the git repository. Pricing starts from $249 (indicative, single-company base scope); the number of models covered, multi-company preference isolation, and integration with existing web-client customizations increase the quoted scope. You get a fixed quote after the scoping call — no surprise line items.