There’s a new rooms/topic method in our HTTP API that allows you to change a room’s topic. Use it to display important metrics, server health, who’s on-call, how many open support tickets you have, when your next release is, or whatever else you’d find helpful.
The hipchat Ruby gem and PHP library are already updated to support this new method. Enjoy!
Two of the most beloved HipChat features have always been @mentions and our inline previews for images and links from services like Twitter, YouTube, and GitHub. Unfortunately it wasn’t possible to take advantage of this awesome functionality when using our rooms/message API, but that changes today! You can now choose to have your API messages treated just like your own messages by setting the message_format=text argument. The default value is html which lets you do your own lightweight HTML formatting instead.
This is a powerful change because you now have a way for your automated tools to notify people (even if they’re offline);
as well as send in helpful links like Tweets so your team is aware of the latest happenings;
Oh, and as you may have noticed, we’ve added gray as a background color option since it looks a lot nicer for this type of data.
Check the API documentation for full details. Enjoy!
You’ve always been able to send messages to HipChat rooms via the API but now you can read them back out as well. Just use the new rooms/history method.
Note that this isn’t a streaming API and that there is a delay of about a minute before sent messages will be available using this method. If you are hoping to build a bot or some other real-time interaction drop us a note and let us know that you’d like to help test our upcoming XMPP support.
Many people switching from 37 Signals’ Campfire to HipChat have asked for an easier way to update the scripts they use to send notification messages to their rooms. Now we have one. It won’t let you configure all the fields we support (like sender name) but should provide a helpful starting point.
By the way, we already have integrations with GitHub, Pivotal Tracker, and other services as well as libraries to help you build your own.
Welcome to HipChat!
