Mattermost v1.4: Centralized product documentation

January 16, 2016

Platform

Two fundamental elements of open source projects are having effective, easy-to-use, centralized product documentation and real-world deployments that share back tools and learnings to benefit the community. In this month’s release announcement for Mattermost v1.4 we note some of that wonderful work:

Introducing centralized product documentation

With the release of v1.4 we’ve created docs.mattermost.com to upgrade and centralize product documentation.

docs.mattermost.com offers documentation for end users, team administrators, system administrators and developers

The materials are organized by topic in an expanding table of contents:

These guides are fully searchable and available under a creative commons license. The docs repo is authored in markdown, which uses Sphinx to generate HTML pages, and pull requests are welcome under the standard Mattermost Contribution Guidelines.

You can start reviewing the new docs site by learning about new features in Mattermost v1.4, including:

iOS push notification reference implementation for deploying the open source iOS app and push notification service is available from iTunes. The first release of the Mattermost iOS app focuses on core features, and advanced functionality like GitLab SSO, will be added in future updates.
Legal and Support Settings to set terms of service, privacy policy, about and help links. This helps organizations who need to provide disclosures and transparency without having to splice in an maintain links across Mattermost upgrades.
New Service Settings to customize cache duration, session token expiry across web and mobile devices.
Developer Mode to help surface client-side Javascript info that could otherwise not be received by the server logs. This mode should help increase overall product quality over time. We highly encourage every contributor to work with this setting turned on.
Sign-in Method option to switch between email and single-sign-on options.

The new content will eventually replace the /docs folder in the Mattermost platform with a new organization that should make things significantly easier to find.

Deployments

As deployments expand around the world, we’ve had dozens of Mattermost applications and installers shared back. Many users value privacy and we don’t know much about their use of Mattermost other than what they’re contributing back to the community. This month we’re very happy to see some superb work from a public project at the Eclipse Foundation:

Eclipse Utility

Huge thanks to Cédric Brun for jstuart, a new utility used by the Eclipse community Mattermost instance, which integrates a host of services:

Twitter
Bugzilla
RSS
Mailing lists
Gerrit
Eclipse Forums
Git
Jenkins/Hudson

The integration is ready to be self-hosted and ideal for Java-shops–especially if you’re using Eclipse 🙂

Eclipse projects infrastructure for Mattermost offers Twitter, RSS, mailing list, Bugzilla, Gerrit, Git and Jenkins/Hudson integrations

Puppet

To make deployments faster and easier, this month we have a new Puppet module from liger1978 to bring Mattermost to a host of environments, including RHEL, Oracle Linux, CentOS, SLES, Debian, and Ubuntu.

Puppet module brings Mattermost to RHEL 6, 7; CentOS 6, 7; Oracle Linux 6, 7; Scientific Linux 6, 7; Debian 6, 7,, 8; Ubuntu 12.04, 12.10, 13.04, 13.10, 14.04, 14.10, 15.04 and SLES 12

Redmine

Redmine was named the top open source project planning tool of 2015 by Project Management Zone. Thanks to AltSol, Redmine integration with Mattermost is now available now via redmine-mattermost.

Redmine integration for Mattermost redmine-mattermost by altsol

Mercurial

Thanks also to AltSol for adding integration support for Mercurial with Mattermost. With Mercurial, GitLab and SVN, Mattermost now supports three of the most popular open source revision control systems.

Mercurial integration for Mattermost hg-mattermosthooks by altsol

Threema

Threema is a proprietary messaging client with end-to-end encryption and, thanks to Enproduktion, there’s now an open source integration for bringing Threema messages into Mattermost channels.

Threema Integration Service for Mattermost threema-mattermost by Enproduktion

Many thanks also to our contributors to mattermost/platform for the v1.4 release:

There’s no more vivid indicator of deployments and adoption than contributions coming in from community each month, and that growth is accelerating.

Next: Localization

While we weren’t able to fit it into Mattermost v1.4, we’re immensely grateful to enahum for submitting a twelve-thousand-line pull request to add localization infrastructure and Spanish language translation to Mattermost.

Localization infrastructure and early support for Spanish are under review for next release of Mattermost

Big things are ahead for Mattermost. Huge thanks to the community for being the driving force behind everything we do. We look forward to your comments, questions and ideas in the forum conversation.