Botkit is updated to 0.5.3

Support for Facebook Workplaces, Support for new Slack and Facebook platform features, new thread hooks, and loads of enhancements and fixes!

What’s new?

• We now support Facebook Workplaces! Get started using our Facebook Starter Kit!
• Add a new readme file and moved other documentation into docs/ folder.
• Update all dependencies to their most recent versions
• Change behavior of conversation timeouts. New behavior is documented here.
• Support for Facebook Messenger’s new “Home URL” setting PR #793 New features documented here.
• Support for including parameters in Facebook codes. PR #790 Docs here.
• Support for Facebook’s new “target audience” APIs PR #798
• Support for additional Slack user APIs, including ‘user.profile.set’ and ‘user.profile.get’. PR #780
• Add support for createPrivateConversation() in Slack bots PR #586
• beforeThread Hooks:

These new hooks allow developers to execute custom functionality as a conversation transitions from one thread to another. This enables asynchronous operations like database and API calls to be made mid-conversation, and can be used to add additional template variables (using convo.setVar()), or change the direction of the conversation (using convo.gotoThread()).

• Add convo.beforeThread(), a plugin hook that fires before a conversation thread begins. Docs
• Add controller.studio.beforeThread(), a plugin hook that fires before a Botkit Studio-powered conversation thread begins. Docs

Special thanks to our community!

Josey Morton, manojkumar1412, mruba, Ouadie-lahdioui 2–3, Bunk, Mohamed-taha, monte-hayward, Joshua Klassen, Raniazy, Colestrode,

Botkit now has 🌮 136 contributors🌮!

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• All the code you need to get your bot online in minutes
• A visual authoring environment for designing and managing dialog
• A real-time message console for monitoring activity
• APIs that enable content and features to be added to bots without additional code
• Role-based, multi-user teams support
• Detailed usage statistics
• Built-in integrations with top plugins and platform tools

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