Releasing pretalx v2024.3.0

Presenting a mixed collection of new features, we’re happy to announce the release of pretalx v2024.3.0!

As always, users of pretalx.com don't need to take any action – you're always using the latest pretalx version. Administrators of self-hosted instances and developers of pretalx customisations and plugins are encouraged to take a close look at this release’s changelog for some potentially breaking changes – more below.

Apart from several bug fixes, and some noticeable performance improvements, particularly of the public schedule and CfP pages –here are the highlights of this release’s new features:

Starred talks

You were already able to star talks in order to create your personalised schedule. But so far, your starred talks were saved only locally in your browser, so when you switched to e.g. your phone on the way to the conference, you had to start all over again.

Now, instead, if you are logged in, your starred talks will be saved to your account (and, of course, if you already have starred talks and then create an account, they are saved, too), and if you log in on another device, you’ll see the same talk selection there.

Not only that – you will also be able to download an iCal file containing calendar entries for all your starred talks. We also hid the full schedule iCal download, because most people do not actually want to fill their calendar with all talks in a given conference!

Speaker directory

Organisers can now see a list of all speakers and submitters that were involved in any of their events. You can filter this speaker directory by event and proposal status (e.g. only speakers with accepted proposals in the past three events), and you can also export your selected list, including information like speaker email addresses!

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, but here are some more highlights:

• When you look at a talk detail page, the start and end time is now also given in your local time (if you are not in the event timezone).
• The schedule navigation to switch between schedule, talk list, and speakers, is now always visible and easier to find.
• If a talk won’t be recorded, this will now be shown in the schedule, rather than just on the individual talk pages.
• You can now submit a form from textboxes with Ctrl+Enter.
• Organisers can now drag rooms, tracks, questions, and even question options to reorder them, rather than clicking a lot of “up” and “down” buttons.

Administrators and developers

A quick word for administrators of self-hosted instances and developers of pretalx plugins: The new release will contain some changes relevant to you. In particular, administrators should be advised that pretalx has dropped support for MySQL (please refer to the changelog for migration guidance). Additionally, please be sure to update your plugins while you are updating pretalx, as some internal imports have changed that many plugins make use of.

Developers should know that in addition to those import changes, pretalx has changed quite a bit of the internal frontend structure. For instance, we do not use jQuery and Bootstrap anymore – please refer to the documentation for migration guidance, and test your plugin with pretalx v2023.3.0!

Upcoming features

We’re already working on the next release, which will include a number of improvements to the API. As hinted previously, 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.