Release 1.4.0 of pretix

Within our monthly release schedule, we today release the fifth stable version of pretix. Big thanks go out to asv-hungvt, Bolutife Lawrence, Claudio Luck, Heok Hong Low, Ian Williams, jlwt90, Knuth, Leah Oswald, scabux, and Tobias Kunze who contributed to this release. ❤️

This release contains a number of new features of all sizes. We are excited to publish this release and are looking forward to your feedback! pretix 1.4.0 is now available for installation via pip. The new docker images will appear on Docker Hub over the next few hours.

New feature: PDF ticket editor

We are very proud to present our new editor for PDF ticket layouts. As before, you can upload a custom PDF as a background for your event's tickets, but you no longer need to go through the tedious process of manually specifying positions of sizes of the texts on the ticket without real flexibility and without a proper preview of what you are doing.

With the new editor, you can freely arrange text snippets on your ticket background. You can configure the text content and print new information on the tickets, such as the event location or the admission time. You can also for the first time choose between multiple fonts, text colors and styles. We hope you will like it as much as we do!

The new editor will only work properly in modern versions of Google Chrome, Firefox, and Opera and requires a decent network connection – but we think that's worth it. If you host pretix yourself, you will need the new plugin pretix-fontpack-free as well to be able to chose from more than one font.

We also used this occasion to provide a new default layout for new events. Layouts configured in the old editor are automatically converted, but this conversion might lead to some small deviations, so please check your designs after upgrading.

New feature: Teams

The permission system has been changed fundamentally for this release. Previously, you would assign single users to single events and give them a set of permission for this event. Over time, we have learned that this approach is not flexible enough for organizers with a larger amount of events. Therefore, 1.4 introduces a new concept of Teams:

A Team is a group of users that shares the same level for permissions for one ore more events. For every organizer account, you can create as many teams as you want and every team can be associated with none, one, many or all events of that organizer. A team can contain as many users as you want and a user can be a part of as many teams as you want.

This gives you great flexibility in assigning permissions to the users of your organization. In the future, we plan to enhance this part even further by providing a finegrained permission set.

pretixdroid: Asynchronous scanning

A new version of our Check-In app pretixdroid is available that features an (optional) mode for asynchronous scanning.

By asynchronous scanning we mean that the app no longer requires a good internet connection. If you activate the new mode, the app will regularly download a list of all tickets to the device and then upload the scanned tickets in the background. Scanned tickets will be checked locally, such that you get an immediate response even if your internet connection is down or just slow.

On the downside, when scanning with multiple devices at the same time, this means that the same ticket might be redeemed twice if it is scanned by the two devices in a short timeframe that was not sufficient for the devices to synchronize. This new feature requires the server to run pretix 1.4.0 or newer.

New plugin: MailChimp integration

Using the MailChimp plugin, you can offer your customers to direcly sign themselves up for your newsletter. If they do, the email address will be automatically added to one of your MailChimp lists – no manual process involved.

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This plugin is now available to all customers of our Hosted service. If you want to use it, just go to the Plugin section of your event settings and activate it! If you are interested in an installation of these plugins in your self-hosted pretix instance, please contact us and we will work something out for you.

Smaller changes and bugfixes

• Critical bug fixed that lead to wrong amount being payed when switching the payment method to PayPal for an existing order.

• You can now set a multi-line location of your event and configure the event's admission time. The event front page now displays this kind of information above the list of products.

• The documentation now contains a user guide on payments.

• Payment fees are now hidden from the interface if they are zero for all enabled payment methods.

• A settings has been introduced to restrict ticket generation to admission tickets.

• It is now possible to configure an email signature that will be appended to all event-related emails.

• It is now possible to easily create a new mass email based on the contents of a prior email.

• Placeholders for email templates are now a little bit more consistent and will be validated for correctness.

• Common typos in email addresses are now detected automatically based on the entered attendee or company name.

• The date of single-day events is now rendered correctly everywhere.

• The control panel now includes a new dashboard widget and a list of checked-in or not-checked-in tickets.

• You can now set a logo and an introductory text for organizer profile pages.

• Added a colorpicker widget for color settings in the control panel.

• If a user has an active shopping cart while the configured date "end of presale" is reached, the user is now notified earlier than before.

• During setup of two-factor authentication, it is now possible to obtain the private key without scanning a barcode.

• The handling of imported MT940 files has been improved, especially for Swiss banks.

• The plugin providing the check-in list export is now enabled by default.

• Fixed display of wrong text if a banktransfer payment has been marked as arrived manually.

• Fixed bug that lead to names being used instead of email addresses in the check-in list CSV export.

• Django has been upgraded to version 1.11.

Changes to official plugins

• pretix-pages, a mini-CMS inside pretix, has been released in version 1.2.0. Pages can now manually be re-ordered and thhe "Change event settings" permission is now required to edit a page.

• pretix-passbook, a ticket output provider for Apple wallet files, has been released in version 1.1.0 and now automatically suggests geo coordinates from your event location.

• pretix-sepadebit, a payment provider plugin for SEPA direct debit, has been released in version 1.1.0 to be compatible with pretix 1.4. Also, it is now able to list the orders that are contained in a specific exported SEPA XML file.

• pretix-cartshare has been released in version 1.1 to be compatible to pretix 1.4.0.

• The new plugin pretix-fontpack-free adds a set of free fonts to the choices in the ticket editor.

Plugin API changes

• The request.eventperm and request.orgaperm attributes have been removed together with the EventPermission and OrganizerPermission database models. This will likely require changes to your custom plugins. We advise to use the new helper functions User.has_event_permission, User.has_organizer_permission, User.get_event_permission_set, User.get_organizer_permission_set, and User.get_events_with_any_permission.

• New signal: pretix.presale.signals.contact_form_fields