2025.1.0 2025-05-28

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] On touch-based devices, the session favourite button is now always shown, rather than being hidden behind an impossible-to-find hover action.

  • [Feature] When you embed the pretalx widget on an external page, clicking on session links will open the session details (or speaker details) in a popup on the same page, instead of directing attendees to the pretalx schedule page.

  • [Feature] Organisers can now configure additional links to show in the top menu next to “Schedule”, “Sessions”, “Speakers”, handy for links back to the conference website, streams, etc.

  • [Feature] All outbound links are now passed via a redirect page in order to prevent URL leakage by referer headers.

  • [Feature] When a room is empty during a day, pretalx will not show it anymore in the grid schedule (rather than only hiding rooms that are never used).

  • [Feature] The schedule widget can now be used for selected dates, e.g. when some of your rooms are not in use on some days (like switching to a workshop-heavy programme on some conference days). For conferences like this, you could embed the schedule widget twice: Once for one set of days and once for the other set.

  • [Fixed bug] The QR code link of public schedule exporters was sometimes placed outside the visible screen.

  • [Fixed bug] The calendar parts of the public schedule (day of week, month) were always in English, even if another language was selected. (#1874)

Call for Papers

  • [Feature] Due to the current limitations of the pretalx logging system, the log entries sidebar was removed from the speaker/submitter-facing session pages. Organisers still have access to the history view.

  • [Feature] As the availabilities feature was confusing or not required for many events, pretalx now defaults to not requesting a speaker’s availabilities.

  • [Feature] pretalx will now send an email after a user changes their password, notifying them of the change.

  • [Fixed bug] The ampersand character appeared escaped when placed in a drop-down menu (e.g. in a track or session type name).

  • [Fixed bug] The upload of files with very long file names would fail instead of showing an error message. pretalx will now truncate the filename instead.

Organiser backend

  • [Feature] We started writing the pretalx user guide. Currently, the section Sessions & Proposals is finished and further sections are in the works. We also expanded the FAQ.

  • [Feature] Organisers can now configure footer links that will be shown on all schedule pages.

  • [Feature] In order to make it easier for organisers of multiple events to see which event they are currently editing, the green line in the top navigation bar is now of the current event’s colour instead.

  • [Fixed bug] The CfP editor in the organiser area only showed session questions, not speaker questions. (#2022)

  • [Fixed bug] The organiser indicator in the various log entry views was accidentally invisible.

  • [Fixed bug] Dragging and dropping questions and other elements to change their order was broken in Google Chrome.

  • [Fixed bug] When entering a HTML colour manually instead of using the colour picker, pretalx would expand a three-letter colour to a six-letter colour (e.g. #123 to #112233), which is technically correct, but also not helpful when you’re in the process of typing out a six-letter colour, so pretalx will now not expand these colours anymore.

Organiser backend: E-Mails

  • [Feature] You can now use the new {session_duration_minutes} email placeholder.

  • [Feature] Organisers can now customise the template used to inform speakers when they are added to a proposal by an organiser. There are two new templates – one for speakers with an existing account, and one for speakers without account who need to set their password. (#1302)

  • [Feature] Organisers can now customise the “New proposal” notification email contents. (#1311)

  • [Feature] You can now send or discard only a filtered list of emails from the outbox.

  • [Feature] Outgoing mails now know which proposals or sessions they are about. This information can’t be added to existing mails, but will be included in all new mails, which will link to the proposals in question, and will help you find relevant emails by showing the linked proposals and their track colours (if any).

  • [Fixed bug] The template indicator (showing you which template an email was generated from) in the email lists were invisible. (#1879)

Organiser backend: Speaker management

  • [Feature] Organisers can now mark speakers as “arrived” on the speakers detail page and on the speakers tab of accepted sessions. (#1892)

  • [Feature] You can filter the speaker list by speaker arrival status. (#1626)

Organiser backend: Session management

  • [Feature] When you apply pending changes to proposals, you can now apply the changes to only your current, filtered list of proposals.

  • [Feature] On proposal, speaker and review pages, where possible, a speaker’s other proposals are linked to provide organisers and reviewers with further context.

  • [Feature] If you have pending state changes in your sessions, pretalx will show you the total number on the event dashboard.

  • [Feature] You can now apply a proposal’s pending state change from the detail view.

  • [Feature] The event dashboard now includes more useful session counts depending on the current event phase, like highlighting the number of not-yet-confirmed sessions. (#1951)

  • [Feature] When creating a proposal as an organiser, track/session type specific questions are skipped at first and only shown once the proposal was created. (#1955)

  • [Feature] Organisers and reviewers can now leave comments on proposals. Comments are shown in chronological order, and users can of course comment multiple times, rather than leaving a single review.

  • [Fixed bug] The numbers of proposals in the track overview were inflated because deleted and draft proposals were included in the count.

Organiser backend: Review process

  • [Feature] If you use both track-based reviewer teams and review assignments, pretalx will now only suggest (and allow) proposals to be assigned to a reviewer who has access to that proposal’s track.

  • [Feature] Reviewers were shown the proposal state dropdown, even when they did not have the necessary permissions to change a proposal’s state. They are now shown a non-interactive badge instead, and the same badge is also used on the frontend-side for speakers.

  • [Fixed bug] Additional custom field columns were sometimes not visible for reviewers, or offset to the right by one column.

  • [Fixed bug] Fixed several smaller bugs regarding review phase ordering and updates, and made sure that review phases cannot overlap.

Organiser backend: Scheduling

  • [Feature] When you schedule a session outside a speaker’s availabilities, the warning message will include the availabilities of all speakers of that proposal. (#1856)

  • [Feature] When exporting your sessions or submissions as CSV or JSON, you can now choose to export start and end times as separate date/time values instead of a single combined value.

  • [Fixed bug] Sometimes, speaker notifications switched language back to the default event language in the schedule notifications placeholder.

  • [Fixed bug] The HTML export did not work and exported only 404 pages if the schedule was not public. (#1900)

  • [Fixed bug] When exporting all your sessions as CSV or JSON export, only the end time would be in the local timezone, but the start time would be in UTC – both timestamps included the full timezone, so if you went on to parse them with a program, this likely would not matter, but it was confusing regardless. The export now uses the event timezone, as intended.

API

  • [Announcement] The pretalx API now supports write operations, and the format of nearly all endpoints has changed to a more consistent interface. However, all existing API tokens have been migrated and will continue to automatically use the legacy API (with some caveats), so for most API users, nothing should change immediately. You have time for one or two releases to migrate your API clients and scripts to the new API. Please refer to the API Changelog and the documentation on Endpoints and resources for further details. We thank the NLNet foundation and their NGI Zero Entrust grant for making the development work possible. (#1598)

  • [Announcement] The pretalx API has now stopped supporting session authentication, which was never officially supported. If you need to use the authenticated API, please use the documented token authentication process. (#1598)

Languages and translations

  • [Feature] pretalx now comes with new translations, Polish and Vietnamese!

Administrators

  • [Feature] Administrators who have configured an email address for error logs/tracebacks will now also receive emails for failed asynchronous tasks.

  • [Feature] Administrators will now see a user’s last actions on the user page, and will also have a better overview over a user’s events and permissions.

  • [Announcement] Attention, plugin developers and administrators: In the course of the development of the new API, many permissions have changed names (most notably: orga.change_settings to event.update_event, agenda.view_schedule to schedule.list_schedule, and orga.view_submissions to submission.orga_list_submission), and some import paths have changed. Take a look at the changes to the official pretalx plugins for reference. Administrators, please make sure that your plugins work with the new pretalx release before updating to the new release.

Developers and plugins

  • [Feature] Plugins can now add authentication providers, which is already in use in the pretalx_social_auth plugin. (#1931)

  • [Feature] Plugins may now use Markdown in their publicly shown description.

  • [Feature] With the new queuedmail_pre_send signal, your plugin can modify a QueuedMail object before it is sent out. You can handle the sending entirely by setting the object’s sent attribute, or e.g. modify the email text before it is sent out by pretalx. (#1596)

  • [Announcement] The submission_state_change signal is now also sent when a proposal is created or submitted from a draft state in order to allow plugins to take action on initial submission.