RapidPro 5.6 Update
33 views
Skip to first unread message
Nic Pottier
May 11, 2020, 2:20:25 PM5/11/20
to rapidpro-dev, rapidpro
Hi all,
First things first, everybody at Nyaruka hopes you, your family and friends are all safe in these uncertain times.
Just wanted to give a quick update on the 5.6 (previously 6.0) RapidPro release. As you recall, we were initially slated to have a 6.0 release of RapidPro in July per our usual 4 month release drumbeat. However due to the emerging situation around Coronavirus, we've decided to take a more agile approach on the 5.6 release.
We are prioritizing features that help organizations more effectively use RapidPro for Coronavirus response work. To that end, also note that we are also offering free hosting to any organization doing Covid related work on TextIt. (https://blog.textit.in/free-textit-hosting-for-coronavirus-projects)
A brief update on that work:
* Adding PO file support for RapidPro flows. PO files are the defacto standard for translating software and there's a huge ecosystem built around them to facilitate machine-aided and collaborate translations. Our work lets you download a PO file for a flow, translate it offline using any number of tools that support that format, then import those translations back into your flow. This should ease the burden on administrators creating flows with many different translations. This is still a work in progress and we welcome any feedback you have!
* Add support for Prometheus monitoring. Inspired by a suggestion to use Prometheus for system-level monitoring we thought it would be helpful when tracking large RapidPro organizations as well. Every organization now gets a unique Prometheus endpoint they can use to collect the current count of contacts per group and current incoming and outgoing message count per channel. This lets you build pretty neat dashboards in Grafana and the like to monitor usage of your various flows. Again, we have lots more ideas here but want to hear from you!
* Add first-class ticketing support. One longstanding request has been the ability to transfer a contact from an automated flow to a human agent. This might be in response to them asking for help during a flow or some trigger words that necessitate human intervention. (aka domestic abuse etc..) In a flow you will be able to open a "Ticket" for a contact which can then be handled by an outside service. To start out with we are supporting connecting either an email address (which you will be able to reply to to respond to the ticket) or ZenDesk. This is still a work in progress but should launch on our hosted instances in the next few weeks. There are a ton of subtle things to think through on this so we definitely know our first release won't get everything right but we are looking forward to seeing how it is used.
* Ease the addition of Facebook channels. Currently all Facebook channels connected to RapidPro require their own app. This is a bit contrary to how Facebook expects things to work and the burden for creating new messaging apps on Facebook has become so high that we are moving towards every installation having it's own application instead and just connecting pages to that application. This should make adding a new Facebook channel a few click affair as opposed to the fairly onerous process used today.
* General usability improvements. We are also planning on spending some time on polish on this release. As there are many new users using the platform due to the pandemic we want to make sure they get the most out of the platform as easily as possible. This will be lots of small changes but hopefully ones that overall make the platform better for everyone.
* Lots of other small things which we'll cover in the final release notes!
If you are working on a Coronavirus project and have feedback on things that would make it more effective, do let us know! Our plan is to continue to try to be very reactive for this 5.6 July release and then pick up our usual planning and iteration cycle for the 6.0 release.
Cheers, stay safe!
Nic and the team at Nyaruka
Reply all
Reply to author
Forward
0 new messages