Highlights

More secure authentication

Using authentication for your chat helps you protect your user’s messages and data. You can now also enable more secure authentication on your chat using industry-standard JSON Web Tokens (JWTs). 

Token-based authentication is more secure. Because tokens can be set to expire, if a token accidentally gets leaked or stolen, any attacker only has a limited window of time in which they could carry out their attack—giving you the confidence of better protecting your chat data.

The new authentication guide walks you through the basic steps to take to:

• Generate a token
• Pass a token
• Activate token-based authentication on your dashboard

You can also use token-based authentication for the REST API.

Read the authentication guide and further details:

• Security: Authentication
• REST API authentication

Comments theme

Preset themes let you select a complete look and feel of your TalkJS user interface in one go. The new comments preset theme is tailored for any in-app commenting experience, such as for a:

• Text or code editor
• Whiteboard
• Media player
• Collaboration tool

With the comments preset theme, you can seamlessly embed comments, mentions, and reactions into your app. Moreover, using ready-made components, you can customize the commenting experience to meet your exact needs.

You can enable the comments theme directly from the Themes page of your dashboard.

Learn more about the Comments preset theme.

Overview of other changes

Added

JavaScript SDK

0.21.0

• Added support for JSON Web Token (JWT)-based session authentication, adding SessionOptions.token and SessionOptions.tokenFetcher. For more details on how to use JWT-based authentication, see the authentication documentation.

0.20.0

• Added the first aspects of the Realtime API.
• Added UserRef to fetch and manipulate data about users.
• Added Session.currentUser: UserRef to get a reference to the current user for use in the Realtime API.
• Added Session.user(): UserRef to get a reference to an arbitrary user.

0.19.0

• Added the option messageId to Inbox.select.

React SDK

0.1.8

• Added token and tokenFetcher props to Session. For more details on how to use JWT-based authentication, see the authentication documentation.

React Native SDK

0.10.0

• Added token and tokenFetcher props to Session. For more details on how to use JWT-based authentication, see the authentication documentation.

0.9.0

• Added disableZoom prop to Chatbox and ConversationList. This allows you to choose whether the user can pinch to zoom in and out of the UI. By default its value is false and the user can zoom into the UI.

Flutter SDK

0.12.0

• Added token and tokenFetcher properties to Session. For more details on how to use JWT-based authentication, see the authentication documentation.

0.11.0

• Added the enableZoom property to Chatbox.
• Added the sendMessage method to Conversation.

Changed

• Made the ReferencedMessage component customizable in the Theme editor. The ReferencedMessage component renders the contents of the message that is being replied to.

Deprecated

• JavaScript SDK (version 0.21.0): Deprecated SessionOptions.signature. Signature-based authentication will continue to be supported indefinitely, but JWT-based authentication is recommended for new projects.
• React SDK (version 0.1.8): Deprecated the signature prop on the Session component. Signature-based authentication continues to be supported indefinitely, but JWT-based authentication is recommended for new projects.
• React Native SDK (version 0.10.0): Deprecated the signature prop on the Session component. Signature-based authentication will continue to be supported indefinitely, but JWT-based authentication is recommended for new projects.
• Flutter SDK (version 0.12.0): Deprecated the signature prop on the Session component. Signature-based authentication will continue to be supported indefinitely, but JWT-based authentication is recommended for new projects.

Fixed

• Fixed an error where a certain combination of unicode characters in emoticons could cause a page to crash.
• Fixed an issue where, under certain conditions, updating a user’s presence (such as by typing, or focusing a window) would result in errors.
• Fixed an issue where performing a search didn’t respect feed filters.
• React Native SDK (version 0.9.1): Fixed a regression with messages not getting marked as read when loading the Chatbox.
• React Native SDK (version 0.9.0): Fixed unnecessary warnings in iOS when calling MessageField methods.

New guides and tutorials

• How to integrate chat into a Framer site with TalkJS
• How to show a system message only to a specific user

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