The release of Zulip 6, a server platform for deploying corporate messengers, suitable for organizing communication between employees and development teams, took place. The project was originally developed by Zulip and opened after its takeover by Dropbox under an Apache 2.0 license. The server side code is written in Python using the Django framework. Client software is available for Linux, Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS, and a built-in web interface is also provided.
The system supports both direct messaging between two people and group discussions. Zulip can be compared to the Slack service and considered as an intra-corporate analogue of Twitter, used for communication and discussion of work issues in large groups of employees. Provides the means to track status and participate in multiple discussions at the same time using a threaded message display model, which is the best compromise between Slack room affinity and Twitter's unified public space. Simultaneously threaded display of all discussions allows you to cover all groups in one place, while maintaining a logical separation between them.
Zulip features also include support for sending messages to the user in offline mode (messages will be delivered after appearing online), saving the full history of discussions on the server and tools for searching the archive, the ability to send files in Drag-and-drop mode, automatic highlighting syntax for code blocks passed in messages, built-in markup language for quick listing and text formatting, tools for sending notifications in bulk, the ability to create private groups, integration with Trac, Nagios, Github, Jenkins, Git, Subversion, JIRA, Puppet, RSS, Twitter and other services, tools for attaching visual tags to messages.
Main innovations:
- The design of the sidebar has been changed, in which navigation through discussions is simplified. The panel now displays information about the appearance of new messages in private discussions, which can be accessed with one click. Topics with unread mentions are marked with an "@" symbol. Channels are divided into fixed, active and inactive.
- Added support for viewing all recent discussions in one place, covering both channels and private discussions.
- Users are given the opportunity to mark messages as unread, for example, in order to return to them later if there is not enough time to respond at the current moment.
- Added the ability to view a list of users (read receipts) who have read a message, including private messages and messages in channels (stream). The settings provide an option to disable this functionality for individual users and organizations.
- A button has been added to go to the discussion to which the message is being sent (Zulip allows you to send messages to another discussion while being in one discussion, for example, when you need to forward some information to a discussion with another participant, a new button allows you to go to this discussion).
- Added a button to quickly scroll to the bottom of the current thread and automatically mark all posts as read.
- The ability to display up to two additional fields with information in the user profile is provided in addition to the standard fields with name, email and last login time, for example, you can show the country of residence, birthday, etc. The interface for setting custom fields has been redesigned. The design of maps and user profiles has been changed.
- Added a button to switch to invisible "mode", in which the user is visible to others as being offline.
- The public access function has been stabilized, allowing you to open channels for viewing by everyone, including those who do not have an account in Zulip. Added the ability to quickly log in without registration and select a language, dark or light theme for an unregistered user.
- The display of the names of users who sent reactions to messages is provided (for example, you can see that the boss approved the proposal by sending π).
- The emoji collection has been updated to Unicode 14.
- The right sidebar provides a default display of status messages.
- New message notification emails are now more explicit about the reason for sending the notification and allow for multiple replies.
- Completely redesigned interface for moving messages between different topics and channels.
- Added modules for integration with Azure DevOps, RhodeCode and Wekan services. Updated integration modules with Grafana, Harbor, NewRelic and the Slack.
- Added support for Ubuntu 22.04. Support for Debian 10 and PostgreSQL 10 has been dropped.
Source: opennet.ru