Mattermost 3.10: New terminal client and Turkish language support

June 16, 2017

Platform

Great news for people who use terminal-based clients for chatting, such as irssi, weechat, finch, and glirc, but are looking for more advanced messaging features and a richer experience.

Matterhorn is a new Haskell text user interface (TUI) terminal client that offers a terminal-optimized interface to the rich chat features of Mattermost, including:

  • Channel creation, deletion, and membership management commands
  • Optimized channel-switching modes
  • Message posting, editing, replying, and deletion
  • Convenient URL-opening with local browser
  • Secure password entry via external command (e.g. OSX keychain)
  • Plus many others … please check here for further details

You can find details on how to install and run Matterhorn on GitHub including pre-built binary releases which are available for some platforms.

Matterhorn is currently supported on macOS and Linux. Note that Matterhorn versions are tied to Mattermost server versions: for example, a Matterhorn version string like “30802.X.Y” goes with Mattermost server version 3.8.2.

Thanks to Galois, Inc., our 3.10 MVP, for funding the project and primary authors Jonathan Daugherty, Getty Ritter, and Jason Dagit as well as the many individuals who provided feedback and suggestions. Read Getty’s blog post on galois.com where he explains the motivations for this project, why the team chose Haskell, and their experiences.

The Matterhorn team welcomes contributions so drop by the GitHub page if you’d like to get started!

Mattermost 3.10 is now available for download. Other topics in this issue:

3.10 New End-User Features
      Mattermost in Turkish
      New and Improved Keyboard Shortcuts
Latest Server-side Updates
Haskell Library for Mattermost
Run Mattermost as a VMware or VirtualBox Virtual Machine
3.10 Community Integrations
      Webhook Proxy Server
      Redmine Plugin
      Naemon / OMD Notifications Plugin
Coming Soon! New Mobile Apps Release
Coming Soon! Mattermost 4.0
Upcoming Removed and Deprecated Features
Thank You to Our Contributors
Install or Upgrade Mattermost

3.10 New End-User Features

Mattermost Turkish Language Support

Selam! This month we are reaching out to our Turkish-speaking users. Yes, we have added another important language to Mattermost – because we believe in making the best messaging platform available in people’s own native tongue. Workplace messaging with Mattermost is available in English, German, French, Spanish, Chinese (both simplified and traditional), Korean, Japanese, Dutch, Portuguese, Russian, Polish and now Turkish.

Thanks to the dozens of contributors who helped make the Turkish release possible and in particular Kaya Zeren who did the bulk of the translation.

More than a dozen other language translations are currently in progress, including Italian, Norwegian, Indonesian and Breton. If you’d like to help, or volunteer to translate a new language, please join the Mattermost localization channel to meet the community and get started.

A special thanks also to our localization leads, in no particular order: aeomin (Simplified Chinese), Archie Roller (Russian), Carlos Panato (Portuguese), Christian Arnold (German), Elias Nahum (Spanish), Hyeseong Kim (Korean), Kaya Zeren (Turkish), Robert (Polish), Rodrigo Corsi (Portuguese), Ryo Onodera (Japanese), Tim Estermann (German), Tze-Kei Lee (Traditional Chinese), William Gathoye (French) and Yusuke Nemoto (Japanese).

New and Improved Keyboard Shortcuts

Shortcuts not only make software apps easier to use, they also drive up productivity. In 3.10 we have improved the CTRL+K shortcut for switching channels. You’ll find it much more responsive. Use it to list all channels, not just those you have joined.

We have also added the following keyboard shortcuts:

  • SHIFT+UP: Use this simple shortcut to reply to the most recent message. This was the most requested shortcut from our user community.
  • CTRL/CMD+SHIFT+K: Allows you to browse through direct and group message channels.

Latest Server-side Updates

Haskell Library for Mattermost

Work on the Haskell TUI terminal chat client also involved the development of mattermost-api, a Haskell package providing HTTP API bindings to the Mattermost service. The mattermost-api package can be found on GitHub and Hackage.

Run Mattermost as a VMware or VirtualBox Virtual Machine

Now available for download from Bitnami, the new Debian Virtual Machine release adds Mattermost Team Edition 3.9.0 to the wide variety of third-party deployment solutions, including other open source projects as well as commercial solutions.

These are especially suited to organizations that wish to ensure the confidentiality of information within a private network while giving users a convenient and natural means of communication.

The Bitnami Debian VM is an easy-to-use, open source, team communication solution that deploys effortlessly on your existing private cloud infrastructure. It combines Mattermost Team Edition 3.9.0 with Bitnami, an extensive library of installers, software packages and virtual appliances. Bitnami automates deployments to your organization’s existing cloud provider’s account for all leading platforms, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and Oracle Cloud Platform.

3.10 Community Integrations

Once again we are indebted to members of the Mattermost community for their fantastic contributions to the project. Highlights of Community Integrations for the 3.10 release include:

Webhook Proxy Server

Incoming webhooks allow external applications to post messages into Mattermost channels and direct messages by sending a specifically formatted JSON payload via HTTP POST request to a secret Mattermost URL. These are generated specifically for each application.

If you want to spend less time configuring, hosting, debugging and maintaining your webhook instance, Hookdoo offers a SaaS solution. It offers all of the capabilities webhook provides, plus a lot more, and all that packaged in a nice friendly web interface.

You can find out more to get you started, and some sample applications, here.

Thanks to Adnan Hajdarević for this contribution!

Redmine Plugin

Written using the Ruby on Rails framework, Redmine is a cross-platform and cross-database project management web application. With the Redmine Mattermost plugin you can:

  • Post information to messenger channel
    • Post issue updates
    • Post private issue updates
    • Display watchers
    • Convert username to mentions
    • Plus many others … please check here for further details
  • Overwrite messenger settings at project level
  • Parent project support
  • Multiple channel support

Find out more about the plugin here on GitHub.

Thanks to AlphaNodes for this integration.

Naemon / OMD Notifications Plugin

Naemon is a monitoring suite designed to give you a clear view of the state of your network and applications. It is often bundled with OMD (Open Monitoring Distribution), a single linux package (rpm/deb) which installs Naemon with a couple of common addons.

A new integration installer enables Naemon/OMD notifications to be sent to a Mattermost server. You can find configuration details here.

Thanks to Marco Peterseil for this contribution.

OMD/Naemon Notifications

Coming Soon! New Mobile Apps Release

On July 5 we will release a new, stable version of our mobile apps (both iOS and Android). Feedback on the beta version has been excellent – thanks to everyone who has contributed and helped with the testing.

New features that will be added or improved since the beta release include:

  • GitLab SSO
  • Team sidebar
  • Unread channels section on the sidebar
  • Search filter for channel switcher
  • Markdown improvements (e.g. emoji rendering)
  • … and much more!

Coming Soon! Mattermost 4.0

The next Mattermost server release, Mattermost 4.0, will be available on July 16 with:

  • Updated UI and new default theme – a new look and feel that will make Mattermost easier to use and navigate
  • Emoji picker available to all users in stable form (previously beta only)
  • APIv4 stable release. We announced this in our May newsletter as a release candidate. It makes the Mattermost API web service easier to use and offers more powerful options for integrations
  • An easy-to-deploy E20 Enterprise Edition platform for clustering environments with increased performance

Plus other features – so be sure to watch out for our July 16 newsletter!

Upcoming Removed and Deprecated Features

Here’s a quick heads-up on features that will be removed or deprecated (no longer supported) with upcoming releases.

For a complete list of past and upcoming deprecated features, see our website.

Thank You to Our Contributors

Many thanks to all of our other contributors to this release:

/platform

/docs

/mattermost-api-reference

/mattermost-redux

/mattermost-mobile

/desktop

/mattermost-docker

/android

/mattermost-selenium

/gorp

/ios

/mattermost-kubernetes

Install or Upgrade Mattermost

Install a new instance of Mattermost with instructions from our download page. Check out our upgrade guide for guidance on updating to the latest version with Turkish language support, webhook proxy server and other new features.

Enterprise Edition

Mattermost Enterprise Edition E10 and E20 are commercial versions of Mattermost designed for large organizations backed by commercial support from Mattermost, Inc. and available by subscription. See the feature list for more detail.

Looking for help on install and upgrade? A subscription also entitles you to upgrade and installation help from Mattermost, Inc.

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Lindsay Brock is the former Head of Product for Mattermost, Inc. Prior to joining Mattermost in January 2015, she served as a product manager for SpinPunch, a Y Combinator-backed online gaming startup. Lindsay is an alumnus of the University of Waterloo, where she earned a bachelor of applied science degree in engineering.

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