Slack is a team communication tool available across a range of devices and platforms.
The purpose of Slack is to bring together internal communication and collaboration into one place. It makes communication more direct and transparent across the team. A bot, at its most basic, is a piece of software that performs an automated task. Every developer loves bots and ofcourse Slack offers a one. Bots are a useful way to interact with chat services such as Slack.
SlackBots are basically a computerized response to something said on a channel. For example, if a person enters something in a channel, the bot will post the appropriate response in the channel.
We will see how to get started with integrating our PHP application to Slack, by making it post messages to a Slack channel based on a keyword entered in it. Let's call our bot as extbot.
We are making a skeleton here so you can extend it more if you desire. See the example below.
Message:
extbot: Public Holidays
Response:
January 1 - New Year
May 1 - Labour Day
December 25 - Christmas