2023.1.0 2023-08-30

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] In the emails sent to speakers when their talks change, they will now also receive calendar files for the changed talks. (#699)

• [Feature] Track descriptions are now shown publicly on the schedule page, in the track filter.

• [Feature] You can now filter the schedule by proposal track.

• [Feature] If organisers provide a room description, it is now shown in the room header in the grid schedule.

• [Feature] Breaks are now also shown on the mobile/minimal/linear schedule.

• [Feature] On sessions that have both videos and images, videos now show up first, and the overall layout is improved.

• [Feature] Not so much a feature as a change: Speaker images are now cropped to the centre in the speaker list squares instead of to the top.

• [Feature] Use speaker profile images as social media preview where possible.

• [Feature] Header images are now used as fallback for social media preview images if there’s no logo.

• [Feature] The schedule widget can now be given a top margin at which to stop the scrolling of its room/day headers.

• [Feature] If you upload an image to a session, it is now used as a preview image on social media (with a fallback to the conference logo).

• [Feature] Speaker and talk pages now always use the user’s current locale when formatting dates. (#1272)

• [Feature] Caching of schedule pages is reset the moment a new schedule version is released, so that integrations (for example with Venueless) that push notifications on new schedule releases will always see the actual new schedule.

• [Fixed bug] Talks that were scheduled, but not confirmed by the speaker yet would be shown in the public speaker profile. (#1498)

• [Fixed bug] The schedule widget was not showing up for some locales (particularly Chinese).

• [Fixed bug] Fix social media preview images sometimes not showing up due to robots.txt constraints.

• [Fixed bug] Pretalx displayed speaker profile pictures even if profile pictures were not requested in the CfP, if they existed e.g. from past events.

• [Fixed bug] In some cases, individual talk iCal files could be empty. (#1247)

Call for Papers

• [Feature] A talk’s duration is now listed on the talk acceptance site to avoid misunderstandings early on. (#889)

• [Feature] Speaker availabilities are now limited to the sum of all room availabilities. (#1418)

• [Feature] Speakers (or rather submitters) can now save a proposal as a draft while they are working on finishing the submission process. (#672)

• [Feature] The state of a proposal is now marked as “in review” on the speaker-facing side once the CfP closes, to make it clearer that there is no action to be taken at that time.

• [Feature] Following a confirmation link to a proposal you don’t have access to now shows a helpful page prompting you to double-check your account is correct. Anonymous users will be directed to log in first. (#1301)

• [Feature] If a submission type has a duration of 0 minutes, its duration won’t be shown.

• [Feature] If you try to upload files that are larger than the upload limit, pretalx will now warn you before you even attempt the upload.

• [Feature] There are new question types: You can now ask for a URL, a date, or a date and a time (and you can set allowed ranges for the latter two).

• [Feature] Organisers can now configure not just field help texts, but also field titles/labels.

• [Fixed bug] pretalx now shows the actual file upload limit to users uploading resources rather than a slightly too-large one. (#1363)

• [Fixed bug] Events with per-submission-type questions sometimes saw empty questions pages in the CfP flow.

• [Fixed bug] Availability times provided while confirming a proposal were not saved. (#1307)

• [Fixed bug] On new events, questions could not be limited by track (because the field was hidden, due to legacy migrations).

• [Fixed bug] In some situations, it was impossible to delete uploaded files in question answers.

Organiser backend

• [Feature] The list of team members is now always sorted by name. (#1440)

• [Feature] Image previews (e.g. for event logos) now handle transparency by adding a chequered background, so even the white logo fans can still see their images. (#1061)

• [Feature] The featured talks page is now linked in the corresponding setting, making it easier for organisers to find. (#963)

• [Feature] You can’t accidentally remove all permissions from a team anymore.

• [Feature] Teams are now sorted by the date of their accessible events, making it easier to manage organisers with many event-specific teams.

• [Feature] You can now, finally!, use SVGs as event logo and event header images.

• [Feature] The custom CSV and JSON exports are now the new default on the export pages, since they’re more useful to the average user.

• [Feature] Added a way to quickly check or uncheck all the possible export fields in the export form.

• [Feature] The rendering speed of all backend pages has been improved.

• [Feature] Reviewer team settings (like track assignments) are now on the same page as the general team settings, and will be shown only if the team is currently a reviewer team.

• [Fixed bug] The statistics page had an off-by-one problem with the timeline, where every date was shown as one day earlier.

• [Fixed bug] On the event dashboard, reviews of deleted proposals were included in the review count tile.

• [Fixed bug] Some browsers cached hidden fields in forms extremely aggressively, so pretalx has stopped relying on them as much. (#1284)

• [Fixed bug] It was possible to change teams so that they had access to no events – neither via the explicit list, nor via the “all events” flag, which was extremely confusing. (#1260)

• [Fixed bug] The organiser dashboard included deleted proposals in the count on the event overview. (#1259)

• [Fixed bug] Some tables were not responsive on mobile devices, particularly in the organiser area.

Organiser backend: E-Mails

• [Feature] In the email outbox, pretalx now shows if a pending email comes from a known template, e.g. if it is an accept or reject email.

• [Feature] To improve email template handling, the list of emails now shows just the subjects or use case, and you can click them to expand and see the details.

• [Feature] Email placeholders now explain their use when you hover over them.

• [Feature] New email placeholder: {all_reviews} allows you to send all review texts (though not scores!) to submitters.

• [Fixed bug] The reject email template was missing on the template list.

• [Fixed bug] The talk start time, when rendered in email templates, was always in UTC instead of local time. (#1258)

• [Fixed bug] The email editor started to require all languages to be filled in, instead of at least one language. This was unintended, the previous behaviour has been restored. (#1257)

• [Fixed bug] Removed incorrect link to email editor from speaker pages. (#1244)

Organiser backend: Speaker management

• [Feature] Organiser pages for speakers now use their alphanumeric code identifier in the URL rather than the numeric ID, matching the public and API pages.

• [Feature] You can now turn off co-speakers – organisers can still assign additional speakers, but speakers themselves will not be asked for additional speakers. (#819)

• [Feature] Automatic confirmation emails of received proposals are now also shown in the list of a user’s emails, since the absence was confusing for organisers and speakers. (#1261)

• [Fixed bug] Reminders about unanswered questions were always sent in the event language, instead of the user’s/speaker’s chosen language.

Organiser backend: Session management

• [Feature] The submission type and track lists now include links to the filtered list of proposals. (#1347)

• [Feature] New anonymisation indicator in proposal list.

• [Feature] Our longest-standing feature request has finally been closed: You can now set the possible proposal/content languages independently from the available UI languages. (#392)

• [Feature] You can now exclude proposals with pending state changes from your search results.

• [Feature] Proposal attachments can be included in exports now.

• [Feature] Markdown preview is now also available for organisers when they edit existing proposals.

• [Feature] You can now remove a pending state be re-selecting the current state of a proposal.

• [Fixed bug] Deleting a proposal from its detail view would lead to a 404 page (because pretalx tried to redirect you back to the original page, which was now unavailable). (#1278)

• [Fixed bug] Fixed a bug where trying to filter by answers to a multiple choice question would not work.

Organiser backend: Review process

• [Feature] pretalx always showed the anonymised version of proposals if there was one. Now it reverts to the non-anonymised one once the anonymisation period is over.

• [Feature] The review dashboard can now be filtered by question answers, just like the submission list.

• [Feature] Reviewers will see a tick next to talks they have submitted, so they won’t appear like things they should review. (#1185)

• [Feature] In the review dashboards, users can now remove and add columns, including the track, session duration and shorter questions.

• [Feature] If you limit reviewer teams to specific tracks, they won’t be able to see speaker profiles from outside their track(s) anymore.

• [Feature] Organisers can now assign reviewers to proposals in bulk, by uploading a JSON file.

• [Feature] When you sort the review dashboard by number of reviews, it will now only use real reviews, not abstentions. The number of reviews including abstentions will be shown in parentheses.

• [Feature] Organisers can configure how the review score should be displayed to reviewers: only explanation, only score, explanation first, score first.

• [Feature] Instead of being restricted to puny ranges of 0-99 with one decimal place, review scores can now range up to 10,000 and have two decimal places, for all your > 9000 review scoring needs.

• [Feature] You can now export reviews in CSV or JSON formats, just like proposals, sessions and speakers.

• [Feature] Reviewers can now be assigned to proposals directly. Depending on your settings, reviewers can only see their assigned proposals, or will just see them highlighted. (#619)

• [Feature] Review forms can now be sent with ctrl+enter for a smoother review workflow. (#1184)

• [Fixed bug] Review pages were not working when pretalx was run with Python 3.7 and the aggregation method “mean” (as opposed to “median”).

• [Fixed bug] On the review form, mandatory fields no longer are marked as “optional”.

• [Fixed bug] Proposal answers now appear always in the original order for reviewers.

• [Fixed bug] The track filter was missing on the review dashboard page.

• [Fixed bug] Review scores were not copied when choosing a previous event to copy to a new event. (#1253)

Organiser backend: Scheduling

• [Feature] Completely rewrote the schedule editor, making it look like the actual schedule, and added some powerful features like hiding rooms, easy duration changes, and more.

• [Feature] Schedule release warnings are now more actionable, by linking to more problematic proposals directly, or to a page listing all affected proposals for less complex warnings.

• [Feature] The performance of the schedule editor and release pages was improved for large events.

• [Feature] Schedule pages showing the WIP schedule to organisers are not cached anymore, so all changes show up immediately.

• [Feature] When you change an event’s timezone, all talks will now be moved to appear at the same local time. (#766)

• [Fixed bug] pretalx sometimes mysteriously creates two new schedules when releasing one, and then is in a confused and broken state until an administrator intervenes. Now pretalx can fix the situation on its own (though we still do not know how this ever happens). (#515)

• [Fixed bug] Fixed a bug where the time travelling option in the schedule editor was unreliable.

• [Fixed bug] pretalx only recognised overlapping scheduled talks for a speaker when they did not start or end at the exact same time. (#1266)

• [Fixed bug] Sometimes, breaks were shown oddly in the schedule editor, with incorrect start or end times.

• [Fixed bug] It was possible to set a talk’s end time before its start time. (#1248)

API

• [Feature] Added the tag_ids attribute in the proposal API for organisers.

• [Feature] The submission API now includes IDs for submission types, tracks and rooms, rather than just references by name.

• [Feature] Breaking API change: The submissions, talks and speakers API endpoints do not include all question answers the user has access to by default anymore, due to performance considerations. You can restore the old behaviour with ?questions=all, or ?questions=id,id to show selected answers instead.

• [Feature] The schedule API now also includes breaks.

• [Feature] Organisers can see speaker email addresses in embedded API paths.

• [Fixed bug] The schedule API did not work to retrieve historical schedule versions when the schedule version included a dot, as it often does.

Administrators

• [Feature] The pretalx init command now has a --no-input flag for all your automation needs.

• [Feature] Administrators can now change event short names in the frontend rather than having to dig into the database.

• [Fixed bug] There was a very rare bug that could lock up pretalx instances due to a race condition in the review process, and required manual admin intervention to get fixed. (#1098)

• [Fixed bug] Fixed a rare race condition, where on schedule release, two new WIP schedules were created, leading to persistent errors on some event pages. (#1281)

• [Announcement] pretalx no longer logs 404 responses, as you can get those equally from your web server logs.

• [Announcement] Due to database versions going EOL, please make sure to use PostgreSQL 12+, MySQL 8+, MariaDB 10.4+, or SQLite 3.21.

• [Announcement] As Python 3.6 and 3.7 are now EOL, and we are using new Python features, pretalx supports Python versions 3.9+.

• [Announcement] Document that in nginx, gzip should be turned on only for static files.

• [Announcement] Note to administrators of self-hosted instances: documentation for installation and upgrades now recommends that you use pip install --upgrade-strategy eager to make sure you get non-pinned updates.

• [Announcement] With the new move_event command, you can move events to the current day (default) or any other date, like this: move_event --event <event_name> --date 2021-12-26

Developers and plugins

• [Feature] Two new signals: agenda.html_above_session_pages and agenda.html_below_session_pages allow plugins to add custom text to the public schedule session pages.