Product changelog and announcements

The Flex Plugins CLI (Command Line Interface) is the new interface for developing, testing, and releasing plugins. It accelerates your plugin development by automating the key workflows you'll use while customizing Flex for your users.

With the Flex Plugins CLI developers can:

• Build new plugins - Start with a blank slate, or build from a template. Access all of Flex’s frontend programmability to customize the UI.
• Deploy and release plugin versions - Define plugin versions to track incremental updates to your customer experience. Deploy updates for each of your plugins individually, or bundle all of your updates together in a single release.
• Manage your version and release history - All of the updates to your plugin versions are tracked as a history of releases. Use this history to quickly identify and track changes in your application, and select a prior configuration to re-release in the event of an issue with your users.

Head over to the installation guide to get started and our migration guide to adopt the Flex Plugins CLI for your existing plugins.

This release of Flex UI and WebChat UI introduces the public beta version of chat attachments. Chat attachments now includes drag-n-drop for your files, and you can compose a single message with both text and an attachment. For a complete overview of the feature and developer guides to programmatically customize the experience, check out the chat attachment docs.

Other notable changes:

• Flex WebChat UI CDN bundle size has been reduced to 390kb.
• Real-time Queues View is now enabled for all accounts. For more details on this feature, visit our Real-time Queues View docs.

For more details on this release, please visit the release notes for Flex UI and WebChat UI.

We have updated TaskRouter’s error and warning messages to improve clarity and troubleshooting.

Flex-Salesforce integration v1.3.1 and Flex-Zendesk integration v1.2.0 introduce the use of Flex Native Outbound Dialing for its click-to-dial feature. Check our migration guides for Salesforce and Zendesk integrations to see how you can upgrade your integration.

We have updated all Flex projects that use Automatic Updates to Flex UI 1.21.

This release of Flex UI introduces new filter options for the Teams View. With Hidden Filters, your developers can control which users each supervisor is able to view and manage. This is useful if you want a supervisor to only manage their team, instead of being able to view all agents by default.

Other notable changes:

• Flex UI API Reference now includes the list of component children for dynamic components (with information such as key, condition, type, alignment and description)

For a full Flex UI 1.21 changelog, visit the Flex UI release notes.

Reminder: You can pin to individual versions of the Flex UI or manage your Automatic Updates within the Flex Admin UI.

Flex’s Messaging Channel Janitor is now on by default for any new Flex messaging configurations (Flex Flows) created within the Twilio Console, as well as the default Flex Flows created for new Flex accounts.

Channel Janitor cleans up the chat channel and Proxy sessions for completed tasks, keeping them in sync with TaskRouter and making sure that when an existing customer contacts again, a new conversation is started.

Flex Flows are the configuration entities mapping phone numbers to Flex (one Flex Flow per phone number). Channel Janitor is enabled/disabled per Flex Flow. To enable Channel Janitor for existing Flex Flows, you can use the Flex Flow API or the Flex Messaging page in the Twilio Console.

You can learn more about the Channel Janitor and long-lived channels in Flex messaging documentation.

.Admins and developers managing self-hosted Flex applications can now use the “Login with Twilio” option to access Flex without Single Sign-On. These users can login to Flex with admin privileges if they have been added to the account within the Twilio Console.

Review our SSO guide for more details and for help configuring Flex Single Sign-On.

This release of Flex UI introduces new filter options for the Teams View. With Hidden Filters, your developers can control which users each supervisor is able to view and manage. This is useful if you want a supervisor to only manage their team, instead of being able to view all agents by default.

You can now update your Flex application to use the latest version of React and ReactDOM. This allows you to use React’s newest APIs, including React Hooks, when developing your Flex plugins.

This feature is available in Flex UI v1.19 and above. You can update your application to use the latest React version on the Pre-Release Features Page. For more details, visit our React documentation.

We have updated all Flex projects that use Automatic Updates to Flex UI 1.20.

This release of Flex UI introduces image and file sharing for chat channels in Flex. Agents and webchat users can now share images, documents, and other files during a chat conversation. This is currently available as a Pilot feature. You can learn more about this feature and how to enable it within our documentation.

Other notable features include:

• Notification to signal connectivity issues: Users will now be notified if Flex UI has lost network connectivity and is trying to reconnect.
• Initialization error page: If Flex UI encounters an error during initialization, users will now see details of the error and they can download a report which will provide technical details for troubleshooting.
• FlexError class: Developers can use a new API to unify the experience when working with Flex exceptions.

For a full changelog, visit client libraries release notes:

Flex UI 1.20

Flex WebChat 2.5

Reminder: You can pin to individual versions of the Flex UI or manage your Automatic Updates within the Flex Admin UI.