Mattermost 3.8: Deploy with next-generation Mattermos iOS and Android Apps in Beta – Now Faster than Ever
Welcome to our April release announcement. Yes, April.
We are moving back to regular monthly releases in response to feedback from users and system admins. Weighing up the pros and cons, we have come to the conclusion that this is the right way to go for speed of delivery, transparency, faster bug fixes among other reasons. So you can expect a release announcement on the 16th of each month.
Mattermost iOS and Android apps are ready to install in beta.
There’s lots more to announce with our Mattermost 3.8 release: improved emoji support, pinned posts, easier user management for admins and much more.
Thanks for all community contributions and in particular from our 3.8 MVP Vera Lyu. Special shout out also to Carlos Panato and Saturnino Abril!
Mattermost 3.8 is now available for download. Since it includes security updates, upgrading is recommended.
In this issue:
Download the iOS and Android Apps Now
3.8 New End-user Features
More Emoji Support – Emoji Picker
Pinned Posts
3.8 New System Admin Tools
System Console User List and Team Management
Cloud Auto-deploy Made Simple
Community Integrations
Siba Bot Integration
Conduct a Quick Emoji Poll
Simple CLI Utility for Posting Text in PHP
Simple Mattermost /slash Service Dispatcher and Responder in PHP
Removed and Deprecated Features
Thank You to Our Contributors
Install or Upgrade Mattermost
Download the Mattermost iOS and Android Apps Now!
You will love our fast, next-generation mobile apps so why not download them now and give them a test run!
Our main focus has been building the key authentication, messaging, and notification features. Here are currently supported features:
Authentication: Email, and for Enterprise Edition servers: LDAP login with MFA support, and SAML login. GitLab SSO is queued for development.
Messaging: Basic messaging and some markdown, with link rendering. Autocomplete for @mentions and ~channel. The ability to reply, flag/unflag, delete and edit posts.
Notifications: Push notifications that take you to the channel when clicked on, basic notification settings, and bolded channel names with mention jewels for unread channels.
Files: Image upload and image previewer.
Channels: Creating and deleting channels, joining and leaving channels, adding and removing members, favoriting a channel.
Teams: Basic switching between teams.
We’re adding more features all the time. You can check out our changelog for the full list.
To test on Android: Search for “Mattermost 2017 – Beta” in the Google Play store, or opt-in here.
To test on iOS: Sign up to become a beta tester.
If you are interested in making a difference in the early days of this open source project, check out our mattermost-mobile repo on GitHub. You can find out more about the project here.
3.8 New End-user Features
Pinned posts and emoji reactions were the #6 and #7 most requested end-user features and the community has helped release both. Other exciting new features in progress include the ability to archive and unarchive channels easily from the UI, the ability to convert private channels to public channels (50,000+ views in the forums, by far the most) and the ability to combine join/leave messages.
If you’d like to join our growing developer community, we’d love to meet you on our Contributors channel!
More Emoji Support – Emoji Picker
Pioneered on consumer platforms, emojis have become part of any fast-paced organizational culture. They make it easier to give a fast reaction to messages (such as a smiley or a thumbs up). So a great addition to Mattermost.
We have now implemented the emoji picker, making it easier to access the comprehensive set of emojis that we announced with the 3.6 release. Give it a try. Simply go to your Account Settings > Advanced > Preview pre-release features tick Enable emoji picker for reactions and message input box, and you’re all set.
We’re working on further improvements to our emoji features so if you would like to help, join our Contributors channel.
Thanks to Dan Greene for your work on this community contribution!
Like to use emojis to conduct a quick poll? See under Community Integrations!
Pinned Posts
Pinned posts are a very convenient way to provide an overview of the channel or a list of links to helpful resources. All members of a channel can now pin important or useful messages to that channel. The list of pinned messages is visible to all channel members.
Pinned messages are marked with the pinned icon, 
. For example:
To view the complete list of pinned messages, click the pin icon, 
, which is located at the top of the channel. The right-hand sidebar opens to show the list of pinned messages. For example:
See our documentation to learn more.
Thanks to Gabin Aureche for contributing this useful feature!
3.8 New System Admin Tools
System Console User List and Team Management
With this new feature, it is easy for system admins to get an overview of Mattermost users. All users can now be consolidated in one list rather than a separate list for each team, with the ability to filter the list by specific teams or users on no teams. This also enables system admins to manage users who are not assigned to a team.
We have added a new page under “REPORTING” called “Team Statistics”, which shows statistics for the team specified in a filter.
The System Console also makes it simpler to manage the teams a particular user is a member of (remove them from a team or promote them to team admin).
Cloud Auto-deploy Made Simple
Installers and containers such as Docker significantly accelerate the execution of system admin tasks involved in getting software to run reliably when moved from one computing environment to another. These include moving software from a developer’s laptop to a test environment, from a staging environment into production or from a physical machine in a data center to a virtual machine in a private or public cloud.
In each scenario a container consists of an entire runtime environment: an application, plus all its dependencies, libraries and other binaries, and configuration files needed to run it, bundled into one package.
However, it is rarely quite as straightforward as that. You will probably want to override config.json settings with environment variables. There is now an easy way to do this in Mattermost by simply preceding the setting with MM_ and putting the new setting in caps.
For example to override the json property .ServiceSetting.ListenAddress you would set an environment variable MM_SERVICESETTINGS_LISTENADDRESS.
Mattermost deploys to all leading cloud platforms, all leading orchestration platforms, all leading virtualization platforms and it also runs on Linux as a single binary under MIT license.
Community Integrations
April has seen a fabulous increase in the number of community integrations making the release even more exciting. If you’ve built one, or are working on one, please join our community channel for installers or community channel for integrations and apps hosted in our nightly builds server. We’d love to meet you and discuss your work.
When you’re ready to share it, please let us know!
Here are some of the top projects this month:
Siba Bot Integration
The Siba bot integration with Mattermost allows customers to access all of their back-office applications securely from a single messaging app.
Siba is a complete chatbot solution that saves time and boosts productivity. It comes with a prebuilt skill/command repository, a portal to manage users and tools for developers to build custom skills. Read more at https://siba.ai.
Conduct a Quick Emoji Poll
With this easy-to-install feature you can conduct a quick poll of team members or colleagues using a simple slash command: /poll.
You can find the setup details here.
Thanks to kaakaa for this fun addition!
Simple CLI Utility for Posting Text in PHP
mattermostsend is a simple command-line interface utility written in PHP for posting text to a Mattermost incoming webhook. It is useful for monitoring websites, for example to generate real-time alerts in dedicated Mattermost channels when a server is having issues.
Also thanks to joho1968!
Simple Mattermost /slash Service Dispatcher and Responder in PHP
PHP remains a popular server-side scripting language for web development. mmrsrvdispatch is a simple /slash service dispatcher and responder written in PHP for one or several Mattermost server instances that integrates easily.
Expanding the /chuck command to pull content from public web services or a corporate intranet could hardly be easier.
Thanks to joho1968 for this contribution.
Removed and Deprecated Features
Backwards compatibility with the old CLI tool is removed in Mattermost 3.8. See documentation to learn more about the new CLI tool.
Deprecated APIv3 routes removed in Mattermost 3.8 include:
GETat/channels/more(replaced by /channels/more/{offset}/{limit})POSTat/channels/update_last_viewed_at(replaced by/channels/view)POSTat/channels/set_last_viewed_at(replaced by/channels/view)POSTat/users/status/set_active_channel(replaced by/channels/view)
For a 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. By project, in alphabetical order:
/platform:
- aautio, asaadmahmood, bonespiked, bradhowes, coreyhulen, cpanato, crspeller, doh5, enahum, esethna, grundleborg, hmhealey, jasonblais, JeffSchering, jostyee, jwilander, kaakaa, lindalumitchell, prixone, R-Wang97, saturninoabril, VeraLyu
/docs:
mattermost-redux:
/mattermost-api-reference:
/mattermost-mobile:
/mattermost-selenium:
/desktop:
/mattermost-docker:
/mattermost-kubernetes:
/mattermost-load-test:
The Mattermost project is defined by the contributions of its community, and we’re incredibly grateful for the difference each of you has made.
More about Mattermost:
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.
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.
