Releasing pretalx v2025.1.0: Writable API edition!

After some delay, we’re happy to present the first release of 2025, pretalx v2025.1.0!

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.

Thanks go to the pretalx community for contributions to this release: Adam Skrzymowski for his contributions, particularly the implementation of the pretalx-social-auth plugin and the necessary integration in pretalx itself. Florian Moesch for his contributions both to plugin interfaces and improving the organiser area. Michal Biesiada for noting and reporting that our logout URLs should require POST requests. Additional thanks for contributions go to Niklas Mertsch, Emmanuel Ferdman, Franziska Kunsmann, Johan Van de Wauw, and Radomir Mijovic.

As always, we have picked the most important features to be highlighted below – you can find the full, long list of minor bugs and smaller features in our detailed release notes.

Writable API

We’ve been working on this for a long time: The pretalx REST API is now much more consistent, better-documented, encompasses more resources (like e.g. tracks and tags), and most importantly: You can now use the pretalx API to write data rather than just read data!

This change would not have been possible without the NLNet foundation and their NGI Zero Entrust grant. Thank you so much!

If you used the API before, things should not change (much): We will provide support for the legacy API for one more release. Your existing API token has been migrated to use the previously available endpoints, and the legacy API format. You can upgrade that token, or create a new token, or test the new API temporarily by including the pretalx API version header – you can find more information on the new API in our API documentation.

Stand-alone schedule widget

The schedule widget has gained some features, like the ability to be limited to specific days. More importantly, though, the schedule widget will now show session and speaker information as pop-ups, rather than linking users to the main pretalx instance, which was disruptive when the schedule widget was embedded on the main event page.

Header links

Organisers have long requested a way to link to their ticket shop or main page on the pretalx schedule pages – you can finally do this (and much more) by configuring header and footer links that will be shown on all pretalx pages!

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 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).
• On touch-based devices, the session favourite button is now always shown, rather than being hidden behind an impossible-to-find hover action.
• Organisers can mark speakers as arrived from more pages, and can filter the speaker list by arrival status, helping with on-site speaker management.
• Organisers can customise more email templates, like the one used when adding an existing or new speaker to a proposal.

Administrators and developers

A quick word for administrators of self-hosted instances and developers of pretalx plugins: We ask administrators to monitor their server load if their users are API consumers – we have attempted to make the new API as optimised as the old API, but some complex features might result in higher server load. If you observe problems like that, please report them to us! Additionally, please make sure that you’re updating your plugins when you update your pretalx installation, as some internal imports have changed, and many plugins are impacted by this – all plugins we are aware of have been provided PRs with those changes, and all plugins owned by pretalx have new releases available.

Developers, please take a look at the changelog and make sure that your plugin uses the new permission names (otherwise, your plugin pages won’t be accessible to users), and that all pretalx-internal imports are still working, especially if you imported any pretalx rules or views directly.

Upcoming features

Now that the big writable API update is finally released, we’ll have time for smaller changes. We’re hoping to add some more endpoints to the new API, and we’re excited to merge some community Pull Requests, particularly the ones by Florian Moesch providing additional plugin capabilities for organiser area plugins, as well as allowing resources to be marked as non-public.

We also finally got started on writing the pretalx user guide, and extending the existing FAQ, and we’re looking forward to adding more sections by the time the next release is ready.

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.