Welcome to the Slack Developer Blog
A review of our recent updates and the shiny future that lies ahead.
Welcome to the Slack Developer Blog — we’re happy you’re here! We are using this space on Medium for our more-technical customers and partners to read their fill of what can be done with the Slack Platform. This will be home to in-depth explanations and tutorials for our API to supplement our documentation as we release improvements.
On top of that, a whole lot of you are building amazing bots and integrations on Slack and we’re really very excited about it. So, it would be weird to keep it to ourselves: we want to share your technical feats, customer acquisition triumphs and design wisdom with the broader community. On this blog we’ll do just that.
The future of our platform, and what you will build on it, is bright and the possibilities are endless. But no time to waste, let’s dig right in; we’ve got a recap of new APIs and a feature released in the last couple of months that you may not have heard of.
New API Methods: Reactions, Pins, Stars and Group Messages
The emoji reactions, pins and stars APIs all work very similarly to each other because they share the same functions; add, remove and list. The only variation is that with emoji reactions you can get reactions to an item.
Emoji reactions are, at least here at SlackHQ, one of our most beloved features. Different emoji can be used to represent various things for your team, and they get even more powerful when automated using the API. For example, Meekan’s scheduling bot uses the Reactions APIs to run polls and decide when to schedule meetings. If you have a great example of using the pins or stars methods, tweet us, we’d love to know about it!
You also might have noticed our recent update did away with the term “private groups.” Now we have public and private channels and direct and group messages. Do not fret! There is API support for group messages. You can find all of the group message methods under the prefix “mpim” in the docs: https://api.slack.com/methods.
Add to Slack Button
Gone are the days of users copying and pasting webhook URLs and API tokens! Well… at least for this specific integration type (hint: there’s more to come). We built a new incoming webhooks scope that allows you to send content into a Slack team without having to ask for read or post permissions that you don’t actually need.
This is great for any app aiming to send notifications, periodic messages, and/or alerts into Slack. It also allows end users to set up the integration with one simple button, hooray!
We have a lot more coming soon, so stay tuned. If there are any problems you’re trying to solve or tutorials that you would like to see here, we’d certainly like to know about it. Send us a tweet @SlackAPI or post a response and we’ll take a look.
April Underwood, Head of Platform
