The TalkJS default theme has a new look! You can customize TalkJS's UI to your heart's content, but we want the out-of-the-box experience to be top-notch as well. So we went through all of the components that make up the TalkJS interface, and where needed, gave them a facelift.

We want to make sure that we don't make unexpected changes to TalkJS that might affect your customer experience, so we've ensured that all existing themes are staying as they were. But if you're creating a new theme (or even a brand new project), you'll get this new look.

Conversation Actions

The keen-eyed among you may have spotted another new feature in the image above. A little "three dots" menu in the conversation header. This is a menu for conversation actions.

Just like with message actions, you can define which conversation actions a user has access to in the role editor. We currently have one built-in conversation action to leave a conversation, but you can define your own custom conversation actions too.

If you're using a theme based on the default preset, and you haven't made changes to the ChatHeader component, the conversation actions menu will show up for users who have available actions. If you did make changes, check the themes upgrade guide to learn how to add the menu to your theme. 

More ways to filter the conversation list

You can now filter conversations in the conversation list of the inbox based on when the most recent message was sent, and the conversation's subject.

The GroupChatImage component is now themeable

The graphic we use to represent a group chat is now themeable. By default, it shows two avatars of participants in the conversation and the total number of participants. You can completely change the way this component looks, but this also gives you more control over which users' avatars are shown.

Changes under the hood

We're always making changes under the hood to fix bugs and improve performance and reliability. But there have been some even more significant changes recently. There's been an overhaul of our backend architecture to better handle large loads. The way conversation list filters are handled internally has been redesigned to improve performance for users with a lot of conversations, especially in cases where the filter matches very old conversations. And lastly, we're moving more of our UI components to our template system in preparation to make them customizable via themes.

Minor improvements and fixes

• Ensured that when expanded, the theme preview has enough space to show the inbox in the desktop layout.
• We've implemented the /.well-known/change-password standard, so that password managers now more easily let you change your TalkJS password. 
• Fixed an issue where the chat would sometimes crash when the iFrame was reloaded
• Fixed an issue where in certain cases, resources would not be loaded via our CDN
• We now show a clearer error message when there's an issue in the layout section of a theme.
• In replies, we no longer show links in referenced messages, since the referenced message itself acts like a link to scroll the message into view.
• Fixed an issue where trying to upload a malformed image could cause the chat to crash.