The release of Zulip 2.1 is presented, a server platform for deploying corporate messengers suitable for organizing communication between employees and development teams. 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.
Today marks the release of the Zulip server. A lot of interesting work has been done outside the server code base over the past few months.
Main innovations:
- Added a tool to import data from services based on Mattermost, Slack, HipChat, Stride and Gitter. When importing from Slack, all the features provided when exporting data by clients of corporate tariff plans are supported.
- To organize full-text search, you can now do without installing a specialized PostgreSQL add-on, which allows you to use DBaaS platforms, such as Amazon RDS, instead of a local DBMS.
- Access to tools for data export has been added to the administrator's web interface (previously, export was performed only from the command line).
- Added support for Debian 10 "Buster" and dropped support for Ubuntu 14.04. Support for CentOS/RHEL is not yet mature and will appear in future releases.
- The email notification system has been completely redesigned to a minimalistic style similar to the GitHub notification system. Added new notification settings to control the behavior for push notifications and email notifications for masks (for example,
ALL), as well as change the method of counting unread messages. - The implementation of the gateway for parsing incoming emails has been redesigned. Added support for translating Zulip message streams to mailing lists, in addition to previously available tools for integrating with Zulip email sending services.
- Added native support for SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language) authentication. Rewritten code to integrate with Google's authentication mechanisms - all OAuth/social authentication backends rewritten using the python-social-auth module.
- In the interface, the user is provided with the search operator "streams:public", which provides the ability to search through the entire open history of the organization's correspondence.
- Added syntax to markdown for specifying links to discussion topics.
- Moderator settings have been expanded to allow selective management of user rights for creating their own channels and inviting new users to them.
- Support for previewing web pages mentioned in messages has been moved to the beta testing stage.
- The appearance has been optimized, the design of indents in lists, quotes and blocks with code has been especially noticeably redesigned.
- Added new integration modules with BitBucket Server, Buildbot, Gitea, Harbor and Redmine. Significantly improved formatting in existing integration modules.
Complete translations for Russian and Ukrainian languages ββhave been prepared.
Source: linux.org.ru