Highlights

Multiple webhooks

You can now add multiple webhooks to your app. Webhooks can be useful as part of a chatbot interface, to inspect messages as they happen, or to trigger custom domain-specific actions.

To add a new webhook, go to the Settings page of your TalkJS dashboard, and select Add new webhook. Add your webhook URL, select the events that you’d like to subscribe to, and save your settings. 

You can add up to three webhooks if you’re on the Growth plan or higher.

Read more about webhooks.

Accessibility improvements

Chat just got more accessible:

• Keyboard navigation: The scrollable area in the chatbox is now keyboard accessible. The area can get focus, so you can use your keyboard’s up and down arrow keys to scroll the container.
• Screen reader: If you’ve got a conversation in focus and someone sends a new message into that conversation, a screen reader will read out the new message.

Do you have more accessibility wishes for your chat? We’d love to hear from you! Get in touch.

Messages on the Realtime API

Messages are available on the Realtime API. That means that you can now access a continuous, up-to-date flow of data related to messages, without needing to send repeated requests or open a chat UI. 

Version 0.31.0 of the JavaScript SDK adds the following:

• ConversationRef.message: Reference to a message in a given conversation.
• ConversationRef.subscribeMessages: Subscribe to the messages in a given conversation.
• MessageSubscription: Subscription to the messages in a given conversation. 
• MessageRef: Reference to a message.
• MessageSnapshot.content: The main body of a given message. The body is a list of content blocks with entity trees, which means that you can render the message exactly as it would appear in the frontend.
• ReferencedMessageSnapshot: Snapshot of a message's attributes at a given moment in time. 
• MessageSnapshot.referencedMessage: Snapshot of the message that the given message is a reply to, or null if this message is not a reply. 
• EditMessageParams, SendMessageParams, and MessageActiveState.

Overview of other changes

Added

• JavaScript SDK (0.31.0): Added ConversationRef.send.
• JavaScript SDK (0.30.0): Added ConversationSnapshot.lastMessage.
• JavaScript SDK (0.29.0): Added ConversationRef.markAsRead and ConversationRef.markAsUnread
• JavaScript SDK (0.28.0): Added ParticipantRef to the Realtime API.
• JavaScript SDK (0.28.0): Added ConversationRef.participant to get a participant for a given conversation to the Realtime API.
• JavaScript SDK (0.28.0): Added ConversationSnapshot.joinedAt to the Realtime API.
• JavaScript SDK (0.27.0): Added ConversationRef.set and ConversationRef.createIfNotExists to the Realtime API.
• Added the option to mark conversations as read or unread to the Realtime API.
• Flutter SDK (0.14.0): Added the onUnreadsChange property to Session.

Changed

• React SDK (0.1.10): Allow null as a value for the conversationId prop.
• Changed the options for @mentioning a user. Only users who are a current participant in a conversation can be mentioned in that conversation. You can no longer mention guest users. 

Deprecated

• Flutter SDK (0.14.0): Deprecated the unreads property of Session.

Fixed

• Fixed a bug in Realtime API batching, where in some cases calls would be executed out-of-order.
• Fixed an issue where the main chat would scroll down when you scrolled in a message search.
• Fixed a bug where a participant who had been removed from a conversation could still be @mentioned in that conversation.

New guides and tutorials 

👋 Thoughts? Questions? Get in touch.

✨Follow TalkJS on 𝕏 and LinkedIn to stay up to date.

👩🏾‍💻We’re hiring! Check out our jobs page.

Highlight

Control the style of absolutely anything with CSS overrides

You can now style absolutely any aspect of your TalkJS UI, using the global CSS overrides tab in your theme editor. 

Global CSS overrides complement the ability to edit and style chat components. A vast number of parts of the TalkJS UI are currently exposed as components that you can edit directly in your theme editor. However, if that’s not enough, the global CSS overrides tab gives you full control to customize your chat UI. 

For example, with a global CSS overrides you can customize the background of a chat panel however you like, such as by setting an image as the background:

.Panel {
   background-image:url('https://example.com/image.jpg');
   background-size:cover;
}

With the following result:

Chat UI with an image set as the background of a chat panel

Using global CSS overrides, you could for instance also hide the day marker that separates messages sent on different days, by setting DayMarker to display: none:

.DayMarker {
   display: none;
}

The difference between showing and hiding the day marker would be as follows:

Chat UI with and without a day marker 

You can find the global CSS override tab in the Themes section of your dashboard when editing a theme.

Global CSS override the the theme editor of the dashboard

Any CSS styles added to the global CSS overrides section of the theme editor get applied globally, to all parts of the TalkJS UI. To add a style only to a specific component, update that component directly in your theme editor.

For more information, see: Global CSS overrides.

Overview of other changes

Added

• Added support for rich text shortcodes in the message editor. Ctrl-B (on Windows) or Cmd-B (on MacOS) now adds markup for bold text, while Ctrl-I or Cmd-I adds markup for italics.
• React SDK (version 0.1.7): Added a show prop to Popup, that allows you to specify whether the pop-up widget pre-built chat UI should be shown or hidden.
• React Native SDK (version 0.8.0): Added support for push notifications via Firebase on iOS. Note: For push notifications to iOS on Expo, we currently only support using Firebase, not APNs.
• React Native SDK (version 0.8.0): Added onMessage and onUnreadsChange props to the Session component.
• React Native SDK (version 0.8.0): Added hasValidCredentials, clearPushRegistration, setPushRegistation and unsetPushRegistration methods to the Session component.
• Flutter SDK (version 0.10.0): Added support for Firebase push notifications on iOS.
• Flutter SDK (version 0.10.0): Added compound predicates to Chatbox and ConversationList.
• Flutter SDK (version 0.10.0): Added a missing themeOptions property in ConversationList.

Changed

• React Native SDK (version 0.8.0) Removed an implicit push notification permissions request. Users of this library must explicitly request for push notification permissions on iOS and Android 13+.
• React Native SDK (version 0.8.0): Removed bounce in iOS when the UI reached the edge of the content.
• React Native SDK (version 0.8.0): Renamed the AndroidChannel interface to AndroidSettings, and the IOSPermissions interface to IOSSettings.
• React Native SDK (version 0.8.1): The ConversationList no longer highlights the first conversation by default.

Fixed

• Fixed an issue where a group chat with only guests wouldn’t show usernames alongside messages in the default preset themes.
• Fixed an issue where external links would open inside an app even when Cordova InAppBrowser is used.
• Flutter SDK (version 0.10.0): Fixed a push notification error when a sender's photoUrl is invalid.
• Flutter SDK (version 0.10.0): Fixed a build issue on Android Gradle Plugin (AGP) 8.0+.
• React Native SDK (version 0.8.0): Fixed bug in Session when user synchronization is disabled.
• React Native SDK (version 0.8.0): Fixed bug with MessageField.setText and MessageField.typeText that would cause a crash when given certain strings.
• React Native SDK (version 0.8.0): Fixed bug where, under certain conditions, the HTMLPanel wouldn’t load.

New guides and tutorials 

• How to set up the Inbox UI mode as a pop-up
• How to create a poll in TalkJS
• Integrate chat into your Bildr webapp with TalkJS
• Integrate chat into a Webflow site with TalkJS

👋 Thoughts? Questions? Get in touch.

✨Follow TalkJS on 𝕏 and LinkedIn to stay up to date.

👩🏾‍💻We’re hiring! Check out our jobs page.

Highlights

Customizable theme components

The theme editor in your TalkJS dashboard lets you tailor the look and feel of the TalkJS user interface to match your brand style. You can edit the default theme directly, or create your own theme from scratch. 

Each theme comes with a large number of customizable theme components. This includes top-level components such as the chat header at the top of a chat, the user message, and the message field in which users can type messages, or send attachments and voice recordings. It also includes subcomponents that are rendered by a top level component in a theme, such as the user’s avatar and the typing indicator that shows when a user is typing.

Examples of customizable theme components

We’re continuously expanding the range of components that you can customize. Additional UI components will be available to edit soon. 

Read more on customizable theme components.

Powerful feed filters

If you’re using the Inbox pre-built chat UI, you can customize which conversations show up in the conversation list of the user's inbox by using conversation list filters. 

A conversation list with only conversations related to job applications

For example, you can set up a filter to show only conversations with unread messages, conversations that were created or updated within a specific time frame, or only conversations that match a specific string. On top of that, you can filter on specific custom properties, or combine multiple filters all at once.  

You can either use the JavaScript Chat SDK or the REST API to filter conversation lists and select which conversations you return.

Read more on conversation feed filters.

Overview of other changes

Changed

• React SDK (version 0.1.5): Changed to output ES2015.

Fixed

• Fixed a bug in the team_chat preset theme which caused the MessageField layout to display incorrectly.
• Fixed a bug where autoscroll would behave incorrectly under certain conditions.
• Fixed an issue where, on iOS, replying to a message would focus the MessageField but not resize the MessageList, with the result that the keyboard would cover both the MessageField and the ReplyBar.
• Fixed an issue where, when replying to a message that contains a list, the body of the quoted message would be rendered incorrectly.
• Fixed an issue where the message action menu button would stay visible when moving the mouse fast.
• React Native SDK (version 0.7.1): Fixed a regression that would occur when selecting a conversation while onSelectConversation isn’t given. In this scenario, selecting a conversation will now show the TalkJS Inbox Mobile view.
• React Native SDK (version 0.7.1): Fixed a bug where notifications not sent by TalkJS would be displayed twice.

New guides and tutorials 

• How to integrate a chatbot into your TalkJS chat with the OpenAI API
• How to add a custom typing indicator for a chatbot

👋 Thoughts? Questions? Get in touch.

✨Follow TalkJS on 𝕏 and LinkedIn to stay up to date.

👩🏾‍💻We’re hiring! Check out our jobs page.

Highlights

Edit participant data directly from your dashboard

You can now edit the data of any participant in a conversation directly from your TalkJS dashboard. 

To edit a participant’s data, go to the Activity section of the dashboard. From the Conversation history section of the activity landing page, select a conversation that contains the participant whose details you would like to edit. A page with conversation details will open. Click on the name of the participant whose details you would like to edit to open their User details page.

User details page with the option to edit a conversation participant’s data

You can edit any participant detail apart from the ID, which acts as a stable, unique identifier of the participant.

Image previews resize to fit aspect ratio

Image or video files now have improved thumbnail previews. Instead of cropping an image to fit, the preview thumbnail will resize to match the aspect ratio of the message attachment you sent. 

Image previews automatically resize to fit the aspect ratio of the file you sent

If you have previously edited the MessageBody component in your theme, you can follow the upgrade guide to add full support for improved attachment thumbnails.

Overview of other changes

Added

• Added bulleted list formatting to messages. You can now type *, + or - at the start of a new line, and your unordered list will automatically be formatted with bullet points in the sent message.
• Added an unread message counter to the Default Dark theme.
• Added support for playing MPEG transport stream (MPEG-TS) audio or video files (.ts, .tsv, .tsa, or .m2t). When you upload an MPEG-TS file, a preview with player options will automatically appear.

Changed

• Made various improvements to exporting a conversation transcript: the transcript export progress is calculated more accurately; download links have improved; the sender ID will be added to the transcript export; a date string will be used in the exported file name.

Fixed

• Fixed a bug where users who had been removed from a conversation were still able to reply to that conversation via email.
• Fixed a bug in the JS SDK where a rapid sequence of creating and destroying a chatbox would crash the chat.
• Fixed an error where, on the Activity view of the dashboard, it was not possible to delete a conversation.
• Fixed a bug where, on the Activity view of the dashboard, the participants dropdown would disappear after opening.
• Fixed an issue where the chat would crash when changing between chats while replying to a message.
• Fixed an issue where @mentions would break when they contained markup.
• Fixed an issue in the accuracy of the unread message counter.
• Fixed an issue where conversation participants with read permissions were not able to mark a conversation as read.  

Deprecated

• Deprecated syncThemeForLocalDev in the JS SDK. Instead of using this method, you can use custom themes, which give you full control over the HTML and CSS of chat messages.

This changelog entry reflects changes to TalkJS introduced between 12 June 2023 and 15 July 2023.

Highlights

Unread message counter in REST API and Javascript SDK

You now have two new fields available in the user's conversations REST API endpoint that will provide further insight into a user's unread messages. The unreadMessageCount field in the Conversation object will allow you to retrieve the number of unread messages a user has in a conversation. This will help in tailoring badges for the user interface.

Further, the isUnread property indicates whether the conversation has been read by the user or not. isUnread offers a convenient way to determine the read status of the conversation.

Check out the updated REST API documentation for more information and usage examples.

The unreadMessageCount property is also available in the Javascript SDK.

Export conversation data from dashboard

Exporting conversation data doesn’t need to be a hassle. You can now export conversation data from your dashboard with just a click. 

To export conversation data, go to the Activity view on the dashboard. Select a conversation, and then click Export Conversation Data. You can save a transcript as a text file, or export all the relevant data as a JSON object.

The dashboard button to export conversation data as .txt or .json files

Overview of other changes

Added

• Added several methods to Chatbox in the React Native SDK: getCurrentConversation, to retrieve the conversation currently shown in the UI; onCustomConversationAction, which triggers when a user launches a custom action on a conversation within the TalkJS UI; onLeaveConversation, which triggers when the user clicks the Leave conversation action; and sendLocation, which sends the user's current location to the currently active conversation.
• Added the isForegroundEvent property to NotificationPressedEvent in the React Native SDK, which indicates whether the user pressed the notification while the app was in the foreground or not.
• Added a leave method to ConversationBuilder in the React Native SDK, which removes the current user from the conversation.
• Added support for passing data to themes in both the Chatbox and the ConversationList layouts in the React Native SDK.
• Added Catalan (ca) to the list of languages available for localization of the TalkJS interface. A massive thank you and credit to Relab Studio for providing the translation.

Fixed

• Fixed an issue that prevented Firebase Dynamic Links from generating link previews.
• Fixed an issue which disabled zooming in when clicking the MessageField on iOS for the React Native SDK.
• Fixed a bug that prevented handling notifications in the background on Android for the React Native SDK.
• Fixed a bug where the app would not open when a notification was clicked on Android for the React Native SDK.
• Fixed a bug where dismissed notifications were not being removed from the internal list of active notifications on Android for the React Native SDK.
• Fixed an issue in the theme editor where navigation links in test mode would link to live mode, instead of to test mode.

Changed

• Made the WebView transparent in the React Native SDK. With a transparent WebView, the background color you have applied to the parent View will be used in the empty areas around the TalkJS UI.
• Changed the type of the conversation property in SelectConversationEvent from ConversationBuilder to ConversationData in the React Native SDK.
• Upgraded dependencies for the React Native SDK.
• Improved various UX aspects of the dashboard’s themes page, including improvements to the layout and dropdown menus, as well as adding the options to delete custom files, hide built-in (non-top-level) files, and reset a file to the preset version.

One of the most common requests is for better moderation features built into the TalkJS dashboard. We're delighted to release the first of those new moderation tools!

Conversation details

After selecting a conversation from the activity viewer in the dashboard, you can now edit properties like its subject, photo, and welcome messages. If you want to get rid of the conversation completely, deleting all messages and removing it from the inbox's conversation list, you can do that too.

Contact suppression

We've also given you much more control over what content is automatically suppressed in chats, and allowed you to specify the replacement text. So if you want to ban phone numbers but allow links, you can! If that's not enough, you can even specify your own patterns to be suppressed.

• Create + delete users, and choose which conversations they are in
• Edit user properties like name, email address, and phone number
• Edit + delete everyone's messages, and send messages as specific users

Is there anything we're missing that would help you moderate conversations? Get in touch and let us know! Leave a comment below, get in touch via our live chat, or email dev@talkjs.com

Other improvements

It has been 3 months since our last changelog, so read on to learn about everything else we've been working on behind the scenes. First a few smaller features and changes you might have noticed:

• All plans now let you have more guests in a conversation: up to 300 for the basic plan and 1250 on growth, using group chats
• When sending a message with the REST API, you can send it as a reply to another message using the referencedMessageId parameter
• We added a quickstart guide for Svelte and updated the React guide to show both Functional and Class components
• We updated to a fancy new set of icons, so your chats will look better than ever
• We completely redesigned our website and it's gorgeous!

With your help, we tracked down and fixed a lot of little bugs, like:

• Specifying the conversation photo as a relative path like photo.jpg will be relative to your website rather than talkjs.com
• On mobile, the popup close button is normal size again
• When uploading a very tall image, the preview dialog doesn't extend off the top of the screen any more

And my favourite customer-reported bug: A kind Spanish user explained that the word Save should be translated to Guardar and not SaveGuardarThe  😂

However, our main focus since last time has been on improving the performance and stability of our servers. It's all a bit too technical to discuss here, but keep an eye out on our blog for posts taking a technical deep-dive into the improvements.

The important part is that our servers run faster, return less errors, and experience less downtime. We're not done yet, but we're confident that your TalkJS experience will be better than ever.

We're excited to be working on more user-visible features again, and hope you're excited too! Please do get in touch and let us know what you want to see in TalkJS this year, because everything we do is driven by your feedback!

You can now mention any participant in a conversation by typing @ followed by their name. Once you've typed the at-symbol, a menu will come up so you can quickly select the person you're looking for.

With the addition of mentions also comes a new option for notifications. When adding/updating a participant to a conversation, you can now set the "notify" option to "MentionsOnly" to only be notified when someone mentions the user. You can learn more about the different notification settings in our documentation on participants.

New Additions to the JavaScript SDK

• Added a sendFile method to all widgets to send a file to the current conversation.. You can pass it a Blob to upload a specific file directly from your application. If you don't specify a file, the file picker dialog will open, so the user can pick a file to upload.
• Added a sendLocation method to all widgets. It will send the user's current location in the current conversation.

Note that both methods still open the confirmation dialog, so the user can confirm or cancel sending the message.

• Added an onKeyDown method to all  widgets.

React Native SDK TalkJS for React Native v0.4.0

With this release, we have updated the SDK's dependencies and peer dependencies to keep them up to date and also fix bugs in some of them. As of npm v7, peer dependencies are installed by default so upgrading the TalkJS SDK should also upgrade the peer dependencies accordingly. For yarn users, you may have to update the packages individually as shown:

yarn upgrade @notifee/react-native@^5.3.0 @react-native-community/push-notification-ios@^1.10.1 @react-native-firebase/app@^14.11.0 @react-native-firebase/messaging@^14.11.0 react-native-webview@^11.21.2

These libraries are defined as peer dependencies rather than dependencies since they contain native code and currently, React Native does not auto link transitive dependencies.

The new version of the notifee library also eliminates the need to add the local maven repository manually to your project. You can remove the section below. (Your app will still build and run if you don't remove it)

maven {
  url "$rootDir/../node_modules/@notifee/react-native/android/libs"
}

Improvements and Bug Fixes

• Fixed an issue where certain sequences could of numbers and symbols could be incorrectly treated as phone numbers, meaning they would be turned into links or suppressed by contact info suppression.
• Fixed an issue where the scroll position was not maintained properly when the on-screen keyboard opened.
• Fixed an issue where quickly switching between conversations on a slow network could cause an error.
• Fixed an issue in Safari where message parsing could cause an error.
• Our dashboard should now give more useful errors for invalid APNS certificates
• Guests can now delete messages in conversations, if their role grants them to necessary permissions.
• Screen readers should now be able to better announce emoji in messages
• Fixed an issue where push notifications on IOS didn't have a sound
• Fixed an issue where the activity pag'e on the dashboard wouldn't load for certain customers with a lot of conversations
• Fixed an issue where the scroll bar wasn't visible on dark themes

We just added Link Previews to TalkJS.

For most websites, the preview will show the title and a description of the page, but for media sites like YouTube, we'll embed the media right inside the message.

If you haven't made any changes to the UserMessage or SystemMessage component of the theme you use in TalkJS, they should start working automatically. If you did already change these templates, head over to our docs to learn how to add link previews to your theme.

Improvements to the Flutter SDK

The Flutter SDK also has some new goodies in store:

• The Chatbox and ConversationList widget now accepts an onLoadingStateChanged parameter, which can notify you when the widget's content has fully loaded.
• The Chatbox widget now takes an onCustomMessageAction handler, which you can use to respond when the user triggers custom message actions.
• Fixed a scrolling issue when the Chatbox widget is placed in a bottom sheet.

Easily Set Up a Custom Domain for Emails 📧

For a long time now, TalkJS has let you use your own domain for sending emails, and handling email replies, but up until recently, this required contacting support. Now, you can easily do this yourself.

To add a custom email domain, click the account menu in the top right of the TalkJS dashboard, then click "Email domains". After adding the domain, click "details". You'll see some instructions on how to set up the necessary DNS records. Lastly, you'll want to go to the Settings page of your dashboard, and under Email Domain, select the domain you just added.

Bugfixes 🐞 

We've fixed several bugs since our last changelog entry, including:

• Fixed an issue where flag emoji wouldn't show up on Windows in most browsers
• Fixed an issue where in dark themes, the scroll bar wasn't visible.
• Fixed an issue where we sometimes sent the same email notification multiple times

New We have some exciting news! We have shipped a React Native SDK 😄.

Prior to this release, getting TalkJS running in React Native applications required developers to perform multiple tasks like creating an HTML file for the webview, passing parameters from the app to the JavaScript running in the webview and sometimes even adding handlers so the code in the webview could call back to the app.

With the React Native SDK you can get TalkJS running in your React Native application with a few lines of code:

The new SDK makes it easier to use TalkJS in React Native applications by providing React Native Components that will feel natural to anyone using React Native.

Developers will now write significantly less code, save time and also make their code less error-prone. Additionally by using the SDK developers are guaranteed of backwards compatibility, meaning their code will always run even as TalkJS evolves.

So go ahead and check out our React Native Getting Started Guide.

We can't wait to see the cool stuff you are building!

Added: New themeable component, Chat Header - customize the chat header with the new HTML & CSS template.

Added: New themeable component, No Chats view - customize the messaging and layout of the view when there aren't any chats with the new HTML & CSS template.

Added: Autofocus the message field on desktop devices, new option to toggle this behaviour with messageField.autofocus.

Fixed: When a user has been removed from a conversation, it will no longer be reported as unread when new messages come in.