We're excited to announce the release of Zulip Server 1.6.0, containing hundreds of new features and bug fixes.

Zulip is the world’s most productive group chat software. Zulip combines the immediacy of chat with the asynchronous efficiency of email, and is 100% free and open source software.

This is Zulip's largest release yet, with over 3100 new commits since February’s 1.5.0. More than 150 people (!!!) contributed commits to this release, bringing the Zulip server to 307 distinct code contributors. In 2017, Zulip has had, by a wide margin, the most active open-source development community of any group chat software.

Huge thanks to everyone who's contributed to Zulip over the last few months, whether by writing code and docs, reporting issues, testing changes, translating, posting feedback on chat.zulip.org, or just suggesting ideas!

Release highlights

Describing all the improvements in a Zulip release has been an impossible task for our last few releases, and this one is no different. Major changes in Zulip 1.6.0 include:

A complete visual redesign of the logged-out pages, including login, registration, integrations, etc.

New visual designs for numerous UI elements, including the emoji picker, user profile popovers, sidebars, compose, and many more.

A complete redesign of the Zulip settings interfaces to look a lot nicer and be easier to navigate.

Organization admins can now configure the login and registration pages to show visitors a nice organization profile with custom text and images, written in Markdown.

Massively improved performance for presence and settings pages, especially for very large organizations (1000+ users).

A dozen useful new keyboard shortcuts, from editing messages to emoji reactions to drafts and managing streams.

Typing notifications for private message threads.

Users can now change their own email address.

A new saved-drafts feature.

The server can now run on a machine with as little as 2GiB of RAM.

The new Electron desktop app and new React Native mobile app for iOS are now the recommended Zulip apps for their platforms.

Mobile web now works much better, especially on iOS.

Support for sending mobile push notifications via a new forwarding service.

Complete translations for Spanish, German, and Czech (and expanded partial translations for Japanese, Chinese, French, Hungarian, Polish, Dutch, Russian, Bulgarian, Portuguese, Serbian, Malayalam, Korean, and Italian).

See the detailed changelog for dozens more changes. We encourage server administrators to read at least the list of added features at the top, since there are a number of useful new settings introduced in this release that you may want to take advantage of.

We have now completed 30 of the 65 Zulip server projects on the Zulip roadmap we wrote last November, which is remarkable progress (especially since most of the rest have open pull requests). You can review the progress on GitHub. We expect to write our next roadmap in the next couple months.

Upgrading

We highly recommend upgrading, since Zulip has made major improvements in the last few months, and in particular, Zulip 1.6.0 is required by the beta React Native iOS app.

You can upgrade as usual by following the upgrade instructions. There is one special note on this upgrade:

This release has some one-time migrations that can take a minute to run on an installation with a lot of uploaded files, and are not always easily reversible. While the upgrade process has been tested extensively, this is a major release, and you should plan for the possibility of downtime. Best-effort support is available on chat.zulip.org for any issues encountered while upgrading.

Community

Zulip has been moving incredibly fast over the last few months, and I expect that things will only accelerate through the rest of 2017. I’m particularly excited about this summer, since there are about 3 dozen people planning to spend their entire summer working on Zulip.

As a final note, I'd like to take this opportunity to advertise a few opportunities to contribute back to Zulip:

Join the chat.zulip.org developer community, where we deploy the latest experimental features and design improvements. We love feedback from the Zulip user community, and have a few streams especially for that purpose.

Translating! We'd love to get a few more languages to 100%, and contributors to edit existing translations are also very welcome. See our translating guide for information on how to get involved.

Follow us on Twitter or join our announcement mailing list!

Thanks again to the amazing, global, Zulip development community for making this possible! What follows is a summary of the code contributors to this release, sorted by number of commits.

-Tim Abbott, lead developer