News from the Indico World

Indico 3.3

Today, we are introducing Indico 3.3! This upcoming release brings a lot of new features and improvements, including a new Check-in app, accessibility improvements (a11y), document generation and a whole lot more.

The full change log can be found here.


♿️ Accessibility improvements (a11y)

The accessibility of Indico has been improved in this release, in-line with the WCAG 2.1. This means that Indico is now easier to use by people with disabilities, including those who are blind, deaf, or have limited mobility. Notable improvements include:

  • Making language selection, timezone selection and search functionalities more accessible to those using screen readers
  • Improving accessibility of registration form fields
  • Preventing icons from being read out by screen readers
  • Including the selected language in the page metadata (for screen readers)
  • More screen reader-friendly CAPTCHA when registering for events and creating an Indico account

Community Contribution

Feature kindly contributed by the United Nations Office at Geneva

📱 Check-in app

The existing Indico check-in mobile application has been completely rewritten. Instead of a native app released on two separate platforms (Google Play Store and Apple App Store), it is now a progressive web app (PWA) which can be easily installed on the two major phone OSs (Android and iOS) and used offline. The new app is available for all Indico instances running version 3.3 - you can try it out here.

Despite being hosted on getindico.io, we do not collect any data from the app. The app only communicates with the Indico instance that you configure and all data is stored locally on the phone.

🧾 Document generation

A long-awaited feature: Indico now supports the generation of fully customizable PDF documents. You can create receipts, certificates of attendance or any other document you might need. Once generated, participants can download their documents from the registration page.

Note that creating document templates requires knowledge of HTML and CSS and for security reasons is restricted to Indico admins. Document templates are created at the category level and are available to all events within that category (and its subcategories).

📅 “By Weekday” Recurring Bookings

The Room Booking module now supports recurring bookings that repeat on specific weekdays. For example, you can now create a recurring booking that repeats every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday over a set period of time.

⚖️ Privacy improvements (GDPR compliance)

Users can now be anonymized in Indico; this means that all personal identifiers associated with a user will be removed from Indico, whilst only keeping the data that is required for Indico to function properly, in an anonymized manner. Because this is a rarely needed and a heavily destructive operation, it can only be performed by Indico system administrators through the indico command-line interface.

In addition to this, users can now export a copy of all their personal data stored in Indico (data portability).

🔗 Auto-linker for minutes

This feature allows Indico administrators to define specific text patterns which will be automatically linked when the patterns are used in minutes. This will save you time when adding links to e.g. ticketing systems, issue trackers or any other external systems. This feature is available for both the Markdown and HTML editor.

🔐 ACLs for menu entries

When adding custom menu entries to an event, event organizers can now restrict who can view those entries. For example, you can configure a custom event page to be visible only to participants registered with a specific registration form.

Community Contribution

Feature kindly contributed by Canonical

🇮🇹 Ciao Indico!

Italian has been added as a new language in Indico. This was done thanks to a team of volunteer translators who worked hard to make Indico even more familiar to the more than 65 million italian speakers around the world. We promise the translation is pineapple-free.

Want to help us translate Indico into your language? Learn more here.

📈 Other improvements and small features

  • Paper Editors are now allowed to edit their review comments
  • The login page UI has been improved, and it is now possible to use a custom logo for authentication providers

Community Contribution

Feature kindly contributed by the United Nations Office at Geneva

  • The number of future months shown in a category is now configurable

Community Contribution

Feature kindly contributed by Canonical

  • Support for generating tickets and badges for each of the registrant’s accompanying persons
  • Room managers can add internal notes to room bookings

We hope you enjoy using Indico 3.3!

Monitor your Indico with Prometheus

At CERN we run the world’s biggest public Indico server, which hosts more than 1 million events and almost 4 million single attachment files.

Knowing your growth rate is very important when you’re providing a service, and although it’s easy to gauge its scale through database queries and some experience, it’s not that trivial to keep track of the evolution of those metrics. Having an insight into these metrics helps us to answer some of our most burning questions, such as: ‘How has our user base been growing? How are our storage needs evolving?’. Plus, we’ve always wanted to have fancy charts we can present to people who are not that familiar with the tool nor the service we are providing.

With that in mind, we developed indico_prometheus an Indico plugin which provides a Prometheus-compatible endpoint which can be plugged into your own Prometheus instance and then your favorite dashboard tool (e.g. Grafana). indico_prometheus will take a regular snapshot of your Indico database and extract the most relevant metrics, which can then be imported, processed and displayed in the way of your liking.

Thanks to this tool, we can now have a sense of our most active usage periods (notice how the weekends are visible on this chart):

We can also, for instance, see that at CERN we have up to 200 events happening simultaneously, and that there is always something going on, thanks to the various timezones on which our various collaborations work:

The plugin also exposes more maintenance-oriented metrics, such as how many synchronization tasks we have queued up, waiting to be sent to the full-text search engine:

indico_prometheus is of course open-source software and can be installed like any other Indico plugin.