Releasing pretalx 2.2.0
Aug. 15, 2021
We've been working hard since January, and are happy to finally present to you: pretalx v2.2.0. It comes with a whole bundle of new features, plus some UI improvements and bug fixes. Big thanks go to Natalia Katsiapi and Athina Davari for implementing question deadlines, Sebastian "rash" Gepperth for further improvements to the pretalx schedule display, and Lukas Winkler and Christian Franke for improving the documentation.
As always, these features have been available on pretalx.com for some time now, and we've improved them through user feedback. These are the biggest ones:
The biggest change around pretalx is that we now have our own translations platform! At translate.pretalx.com, you can translate pretalx any language you like, or change existing translations. (If you are not sure about your changes, you can also just suggest them, and a second person can then review your suggestion). We'd love to see pretalx in more languages! Any language with sufficient coverage will be included in future. Our current translations, apart from the official German and English ones, already include French, Chinese and Japanese. But there are already the beginnings of translations into Czech, Brazilian Portugese and Mexican Spanish!
Independent review scores
In addition to weighted review scores, you can now also mark scores as "independent": they won't be added up to the total score, and instead will be shown as an independent column on your review dashboard! This feature has been a regular request ever since we introduced review scores that can be automatically added up.
Custom data exports
This feature is for spreadsheet lovers! pretalx comes with a full API to export your data, but APIs are best for technical integrations, not on-the-fly data use. We listened to you, and so here is the flexible CSV and JSON export. You can freely determine which fields and which data to include. There's one export site for speakers and one for proposals – all the data you could want, and more!
Better statistics
Most organisers have a love-hate relationship with the submissions statistics, especially with the big bump on the day of the deadline. To make the graph less daunting, we added a line for the total submitted proposals. We also fixed some bugs on the statistics page – you can now reliably use the different graphs to go to a pre-filtered list of proposals, to find exactly what you need. Even better: you can go from a question statistics page to a list of proposals that don't include an answer to this question!
Better email sending
In pretalx, you can view and edit emails to your speakers before they are sent out. As a new feature, you can not only send out all emails or a single email, but you can also send only some of your pending emails – for example, you could send out accept emails before rejections!
Review scoring
In another often requested feature, you can now choose if you want to compare the mean or the median of all review scores. And, of course, you can export both with our new custom spreadsheet export if you want to dig deeper … The review process is scheduled to see more features in our next version. If you have any suggestions (or want to sponsor a feature?), please get in touch!
Schedule editor filtering
Scheduling a conference with lots of talks just got easier: You can not only search for your unscheduled talks by title or speaker, you can also filter them by track or submission type! Especially at the start of a new scheduling session, this can help cut down on the overwhelming amounts of unscheduled talks.
Speaker information improvements
On a similar note: Another minor improvement to make everybody's life a bit easier are filters (by track and proposal type) for the speaker information notes. Those are especially useful for larger events with separate track teams!
Other improvements
As always, you can see the full list of new features in our changelog. If you're using self-hosted pretalx, the update should be smooth if you follow the upgrade documentation – the only noteworthy change is that our minimum version requirement for PostgreSQL is now v10, so if you use PostgreSQL and are still at v9, please upgrade your database first.