1.0.0 2019-06-02

See the release blog post.

Note

Users of pretalx.com are already on the latest version of pretalx and have access to all of the listed new features and bugfixes. Administrators of self-hosted pretalx instances can find upgrade instructions here.

Schedule

• [Feature] When using a command line client to access a schedule page, pretalx will now output ASCII tables or lists, depending on the format parameter.

• [Feature] At the undocumented URL /<event>/speaker/by-id/123/ there is now a redirect to the canonical speaker URL /<event>/speaker/CODE/ to work around export format restrictions. (#641)

• [Feature] pretalx will now display the schedule wider the more rooms are present, starting at four rooms and reaching maximum browser width for six rooms, to make schedules look less cramped and more readable. (#637)

• [Feature] Submissions can now be scheduled multiple times, e.g. if a workshop will be held twice. (#570)

• [Feature] Exporters can now opt in to show a QR code to their location. The XML and iCal exporters show a QR code linking their location by default. (#62)

• [Feature] Organisers can now choose question answers by speakers to be published on the talk/speaker pages. This setting cannot be changed on once the question has been answered, to make sure that speakers are informed about this. (#403)

• [Feature] You can set the URL of your static HTML export, if you’re using one, and it will be used when generating absolute URLs, e.g. in exports or emails.

• [Fixed bug] The visual representation of a speaker’s avatar is now consistent across all image-sizes and bio-texts.

• [Fixed bug] The iCal export for speakers who had both scheduled and not-yet-scheduled talks was broken.

Call for Papers

• [Feature] Organisers can now permit users to submit (and change) their own talk duration length. (#427)

• [Feature] Submitters can now choose to withdraw their talk even if it was accepted. When an accepted talk is withdrawn, the organisers will receive a notification email. (#700)

• [Feature] Fields with markdown support now come with a preview next to the input field (if JavaScript is enabled). (#402)

• [Feature] Fill CfP form with track and submission type if they are available in the query string. (#628)

• [Feature] Speakers can’t invite other speakers any longer after the CfP is over. (#620)

• [Feature] Speakers can now invite a co-speaker while in the submission process. (#364)

• [Feature] For later reference, the full submission is included in the confirmation mail sent to the speaker. (#563)

• [Feature] If you use tracks, you can now choose to make questions available only to submissions on certain tracks. (#523)

• [Feature] You can now decide if text lengths should be counted in words or in characters when restricting how long they should be. (#577)

• [Fixed bug] When using the back button to return to the previous step in the submission workflow, the data from the current step had to be filled in to use the button, but was not saved. Now it will be saved, and the progress bar on top can be used for lossy (but quick) navigation to the previous step. (#565)

• [Fixed bug] On slow network connections, the login step of the CfP submission loaded in a sub-optimal way, leaving users with a seemingly finished page but without the login/registration form. As a consequence, all page loads (but especially that one) were optimised. (#646)

• [Fixed bug] Having only one submission type in the event showed a drop-down with submission types from ALL events, instead of hiding the submission type input completely as intended. (#642)

• [Fixed bug] A dependency of ours introduced an XSS vulnerability, which organisers could use to execute JavaScript during the CfP workflow of speakers via question texts. We have added a fix against this behaviour, and submitted a report including a patch to the upstream library. To prevent issues like this one in the future, we have moved all remaining JavaScript sources to files, and set the according CSP header, so that execution of inline JavaScript will be disabled.

• [Fixed bug] pretalx did not display speaker availabilities during submission, even when they were required, breaking submission workflows. (#594)

• [Fixed bug] When signing up with an email address with upper case letters included, pretalx only allowed to log in with a lower-cased email address. (#583)

Organiser backend

• [Feature] During event creation, pretalx provides more critical feedback, such as asking if the event is supposed to take place in the past, or suggesting good slugs. (#326)

• [Feature] As an alternative to file uploads, organisers can now also provide their custom CSS directly as text. (#393)

• [Feature] Question pages now feature visual statistics where appropriate.

• [Feature] Organiser can now provide a header image instead of a header colour and pattern for their events.

• [Feature] Before setting a new custom domain for an event, pretalx now checks if the domain has any DNS records. (#589)

• [Feature] Teams settings are now located exclusively at the organiser level. The navigation entry in the event sidebar will take you there directly.

• [Feature] The organiser area has now additional, event specific login pages (at /orga/event/<slug>/login/) which redirect by default to the event dashboard, and appear with the colour and logo of the event in question.

• [Feature] You can now decide to add the robots=noindex meta tag to prevent bots from crawling your event pages.

• [Feature] Since SVG files are nearly impossible to sanitise, pretalx has given up trying, and will no longer accept SVG files as image uploads.

• [Fixed bug] When organisers changed the event time frame, already submitted availabilities would have to be changed upon new submission. (#579)

Organiser backend: E-Mails

• [Feature] Emails can now also be sent grouped by submission track or submission type. (#669)

• [Feature] In pretalx, emails the organisers send out are now connected with user accounts if the address matches anybody, allowing organisers and speakers to see which emails were sent to a speaker. This serves both as a help for organisers and speakers, in case emails get lost, email addresses are inaccessible, or any other issues occur.

• [Feature] The Reply-To field now permits multiple email addresses. (#566)

• [Fixed bug] pretalx was inconsistent in its usage of email senders and Reply-To. Now, if there is a sender address configured, the Reply-To is not explicitly set. pretalx falls back to the instance-global sender if there is no event sender address. A Reply-To setting is available if the organisers wish to provide a separate address there. (#688)

• [Fixed bug] Mails to submissions with titles near the length cap (of 200 characters) could not be created, since with the added “[event]” prefix the mail subject was too long to be saved. (#655)

• [Fixed bug] The rendering of the full submission content in the acknowledgement mail (upon submission) looked weird in HTML, due to missing line breaks. (#645)

• [Fixed bug] When telling speakers about their scheduled or rescheduled slots, a hidden mail template was used instead of the actual template visible to the organiser. (#479)

Organiser backend: Speaker management

• [Feature] The speaker page in the organiser backend now has a direct link to send an email to that speaker. (#459)

• [Feature] Organisers can download a list of speakers as a CSV file. (#559)

• [Fixed bug] When adding a submission as organiser, pretalx did not validate the speaker email address and then tried to send them an email regardless of its validity. (#571)

• [Fixed bug] Speaker without an avatar had a broken avatar-image in the speaker’s view in the organiser backend.

• [Fixed bug] People who had only deleted submissions in an event were still shown in the submitter list, which was unexpected and was since fixed. (#572)

Organiser backend: Session management

• [Feature] There now is a page for submission statistics.

• [Feature] Organisers can now filter submissions and reviews by track. (#609)

• [Feature] Add a field for notes of the organisers for their own use which is not visible to the public and the speakers. (#532)

Organiser backend: Review process

• [Feature] Within the review dashboard, organisers can now accept and reject multiple submissions at the same time. (#360)

• [Feature] Instead of by average, review scores are now shown aggregated by the median. (#656)

• [Feature] Via the new review phase settings, speakers can be allowed to modify their submissions while they are being reviewed. (#598)

• [Feature] Reviewers are now shown a progress bar when going through submissions.

• [Feature] Organisers can now view all reviews, except for their own submissions. (#433)

• [Feature] Reviewer teams can now be restricted to one or multiple tracks. Reviewers will only see submissions and reviews from these tracks.

• [Feature] You can now order submissions by the number of reviews they have received on the review page. (#457)

• [Feature] Due to the generous sponsorship of JuliaCon, pretalx is now capable of blind reviews, i.e. making sure that reviewers cannot see speaker names. (#346)

• [Feature] The review settings have moved from the CfP page to their own settings page.

Organiser backend: Scheduling

• [Feature] Instead of having to scroll with the mouse wheel or arrow keys when dragging a talk in the schedule editor, you can now just drag the talk to the upper or lower edge of the window instead. (#640)

• [Feature] In the schedule editor, the room names and the current date are now fixed to the top when scrolling down. (#486)

• [Feature] If you only noticed after releasing your schedule that you wanted to changes something in your speaker notifications, you can now generate those emails again from the schedule editor actions menu. (#477)

• [Feature] You can now decide if you want to notify speakers about their changed talks when releasing a new schedule.

• [Fixed bug] Changing the order of rooms made the schedule break.

• [Fixed bug] pretalx did not automatically update a talk’s duration when it was changed via the submission type or directly. It was only changed when you moved the talk in the schedule editor. (#587)

API

• [Feature] The submission endpoint now provides a created field to organiser users. (#682)

• [Feature] The API now provides internal notes by speakers and organisers to requesting users with adequate permissions. (#634)

• [Fixed bug] In the (undocumented) review API, reviews of deleted submissions were shown, even though those submissions were not available anymore via the frontend. (#689)

• [Fixed bug] Fix a bug where some fields in the schedule XML export were rendered without their timezone offset (only day definitions, not the talk times). (#618)

Languages and translations

• [Feature] If only one conference language is available, pretalx does not as speakers to choose it from a drop-down, as this behaviour is rather silly.

Administrators

• [Feature] Administrators can now see a dashboard with relevant settings and current information, including documentation links.

• [Announcement] You can now install pretalx[redis] if you use pretalx with a redis server for better caching and/or asynchronous task runners.

• [Announcement] Our documentation now lists the tasks a pretalx instance should run periodically, namely runperiodic about once every five minutes, and clearsessions about once a month.

• [Announcement] pretalx is now able to run with Python 3.7 even when using Celery.

• [Announcement] Our documentation now explains which parts of pretalx to back up. (#606)

• [Announcement] pretalx does not run regenerate_css on startup automatically any longer. This reduces startup times. If for any reason an event does not look as it should, you can fix it by running python -m pretalx regenerate_css. You will also need to execute this command on updates from now on.

• [Announcement] To help make other pretalx installations more secure, we have updated our proposed nginx configuration to include an attachment header for all files under /media, to prevent user uploaded data to be delivered directly to other users. If you host a pretalx instance, please make use of this option.

• [Announcement] A couple of URLs now end in a trailing slash where they did not before – you will be automatically redirected, so you don’t have to worry about it unless you integrate pretalx somewhere without following redirects.

Developers and plugins

• [Feature] Plugin developers can now use the is_available hook to decide if their plugin should be shown on a per-event basis.