Releasing pretalx v2024.1.0

Sticking with our new year's resolution to release more often, we're happy to announce the release of pretalx v2024.1.0, half a year after the last release. This release includes a number of new features, improvements, and bugfixes – read on to see the highlights!

(If your event is hosted on pretalx.com, you don't need to do anything – we'll take care of the update for you.)

Frontend changes

Most new features in this release are aimed at organisers, but some are also visible to speakers and attendees. The most notable is probably that breaks finally show their start and end time in the schedule, just like any other session.

You can also finally favourite (“star”) sessions on their detail page rather than just on the schedule, and thanks to our impressive and dedicated community of translators, pretalx is now available in Dutch and Italian. This brings our total number of supported languages up to 15. If you want to help out, check out our translation platform.

Speaker emails and better placeholders

Only people who have run an event via spreadsheets and text files can tell you just how terrible speaker communications can get. We’ve always made easy speaker communication a priority, and with this release, we made the process even more flexible:

You can now send emails based on speakers or proposals – no need to choose ahead of time, either. pretalx will check if your selection would send a duplicate email (e.g. because a speaker has multiple proposals), and will only send one instead. But if you include proposal-specific placeholders in your email, pretalx will send one email per proposal, of course!

Speaking of placeholders: We keep adding new placeholders to the point that it was getting hard to manage them. So placeholders have now moved to the sidebar, where they are grouped by their use case. If you click the question mark, you’ll be shown an explanation and example output for the placeholder – and if you click the placeholder instead, it’ll be inserted into your email text (no more annoying copying and typos!).

Global search

Sometimes, you already know exactly what you’re looking for, and pretalx should make it as easy as possible to get there. We’ve added a global search to the admin interface, so you can now find any event, proposal or speaker immediately!

Lists and the review dashboard

Many of pretalx’s pages are just lists of things, limited to 25 (or 50) items per page. You can now change how many items you see per page, and pretalx will remember your choice. This is especially useful for the review dashboard. The review dashboard was unpaginated up until now, to make sure you weren’t missing any proposals. This could get pretty huge for larger events – so now, you’ll see 100 proposals per page by default, but you can still switch back to seeing all of them at once.

Other features

That’s not all, of course! We’ve also added a number of smaller features and improvements. If you want to see the really long list of changes, check out the changelog, which we have redesigned to group changes in logical categories, by the way!

• pretalx will now warn you when you’re about to leave a page with unsaved changes.
• The schedule editor is now printable – there may still be awkward page breaks, but this is the easiest and best way to
  print per-room schedules (as you can just hide rooms you don’t need).
• Organisers can now upload question options for multiple choice questions – particularly handy for questions with lots
  of possible answers.
• Tracks can now be ordered, so you can make sure attendees will see the more important tracks first, rather than the
  alphabetical order we used to have.
• As the number of available plugins grows, plugins can now declare a category. Plugins without a category are grouped
  under “Other” (so plugin developers: now’s your time!)
• Organisers can send emails to all their reviewers (via the same interface as speaker emails).

Upcoming features

We’re already working on the next release, which will include a number of improvements to the API. As hinted in our last release, we’re working on an entirely new (writable, eventually!) API, and we’re hoping to show the first steps towards that in our next release.

To get further updates on this new release and all other things pretalx, please follow us in the Fediverse, on LinkedIn, or on Twitter. And of course, if you’d like to contribute or commission new features, get in touch.