Released 4.0rc1

- Implement Bot API 2.0
- Almost complete recode of Dispatcher
- Please read the Transition Guide to 4.0: https://github.com/python-telegram-bot/python-telegram-bot/wiki/Transistion-guide-to-Version-4.0

To install, use pip install python-telegram-bot==4.0rc1
Please note: This release is not backwards compatible to 3.4

We also have a small website now: https://python-telegram-bot.org/

Released v4.0.1

- Implement Bot API 2.0
- Almost complete recode of Dispatcher
- Please read the Transition Guide to 4.0
- Changes from 4.0rc1
- The syntax of filters for MessageHandler (upper/lower cases)
- Handler groups are now identified by int only, and ordered
- Note: v4.0 has been skipped due to a PyPi accident

Transition guide: https://github.com/python-telegram-bot/python-telegram-bot/wiki/Transition-guide-to-Version-4.0

Update to latest version:
pip install -U python-telegram-bot

Released 4.0.2

- Bugfixes
- KeyboardReplyMarkup now accepts str again

Update with pip install -U python-telegram-bot

Released 4.0.3

- Add missing attribute location to InlineQuery

We couldn't find 4.0.4 to release this time, releasing 4.1 instead. 😉

Released 4.1

- Implement API changes from May 6, 2016
- Fix bug when start_polling with clean=True
- Methods now have snake_case equivalent, for example telegram.Bot.send_message is the same as telegram.Bot.sendMessage

Released v4.1.1
This release fixes the Deprecation warning caused by Dispatcher using two newly deprecated (mostly internally used) methods 😁

We are currently considering dropping Python 2.6 support. Would you mind answering this quick poll? https://www.strawpoll.me/10227996

Released v4.1.2

This is a fix release for a critical bug due to Bot API 2.1 changes, where getUpdates would fail.
Please update immediately:
pip install -U python-telegram-bot

Released v4.2

- Implement Bot API 2.1
- Move botan module to telegram.contrib
- New exception type: BadRequest

Also, we have a small tutorial now: https://github.com/python-telegram-bot/python-telegram-bot/wiki/Extensions-%E2%80%93-Your-first-Bot

Update to latest version with pip install -U python-telegram-bot

PS: We're already working on v5.0, featuring an improved JobQueue and better Emoji support.

Released v4.2.1

Minor bug fixes:

- Fix CallbackQuery.to_dict() bug (thanks to jlmadurga)
- Fix editMessageText exception when receiving a CallbackQuery

Update to latest version:
$ pip install -U python-telegram-bot

Released v4.3

- Use urllib3.PoolManager for connection re-use
- Rewrite run_async decorator to re-use threads
- New requirements: urllib3 and certifi

This release significantly improves performance, so we decided to release it separetely from v5.0, which is coming during the next weeks.

We just released a fix release v4.3.1, because v4.3 had a wrong version of urllib3 as minimum requirement.

Please also check out our new wiki articles!

Webhooks: https://github.com/python-telegram-bot/python-telegram-bot/wiki/Webhooks

Hosting a bot at baum.xyz: https://github.com/python-telegram-bot/python-telegram-bot/wiki/Hosting-a-bot-at-baum.xyz

Another fix release, v4.3.2, was just published.

The timeout parameter is now respected again in all telegram.Bot methods.

Update to latest version:
$ pip install -U python-telegram-bot

The just released v4.3.3 brings back proxy support that was removed with the switch to urllib3 in the v4.3 release.

New major release v5.0

- Rework JobQueue
- Introduce ConversationHandler
- Add telegram.constants module

There's also a small guide to help you with the transition: https://github.com/python-telegram-bot/python-telegram-bot/wiki/Transition-guide-to-Version-5.0

We want to keep a list of projects that are related to python-telegram-bot in some way.
If you are developing such a project, please add it to this list: https://github.com/python-telegram-bot/python-telegram-bot/wiki/Related-Projects

To our friends in Brazil, check out this great tutorial by Júlia Rizza:
https://juliarizza.wordpress.com/2016/08/06/fazendo-um-bot-para-telegram-em-python/

Another cool blog post that uses python-telegram-bot for a chat bot with Natural Language Processing! Link: http://blog.algorithmia.com/create-a-chatbot-telegram-python-summarize-text/

We will start collecting articles like this in the wiki, please add any articles you know (or have written yourself) here: https://github.com/python-telegram-bot/python-telegram-bot/wiki/Press

A new release, at last!
python-telegram-bot v5.1 is now available on PyPI

Changelog:

- Drop Python 2.6 support
- Deprecate telegram.Emoji

- Use ujson if available
- Add instance methods to Message, Chat, User, InlineQuery and CallbackQuery
- RegEx filtering for CallbackQueryHandler and InlineQueryHandler
- New MessageHandler filters: forwarded and entity
- Add Message.get_entity to correctly handle UTF-16 codepoints and MessageEntity offsets
- Fix bug in ConversationHandler when first handler ends the conversation
- Allow multiple Dispatcher instances
- Add ChatMigrated Exception
- Properly split and handle arguments in CommandHandler

First of all: Sorry for letting you wait so long between two releases. Second of all: Holy shit! What an epic changelog!
7 different contributors worked on this release, and there is some cool new stuff to explore. Check out our updated examples on GitHub!

As always, you can upgrade to the latest version with
pip install -U python-telegram-bot