News

18 May 2021

Indico 3.0

It’s with great pleasure that we announce the deployment of Indico 3.0. It is a very important milestone in the history of the Project. Two groundbreaking developments happened during these last months, one of them very visible, while the other one not directly noticeable but nonetheless of vital importance.
But lets get to it!


A brand-new Search

For many years, Indico used, at CERN, a proprietary solution based on Sharepoint Search. This was very useful in the past, as it allowed us to save resources and focus on other parts of the product. It had, however, the inconvenience of not providing an out-of-the-box solution to other Indico users around the world. Those had to find their own solutions or just conform to using Indico without a proper “search” option.

But that will no longer be the case. Thanks to a collective community effort spearheaded by CERN but which also included colleagues from Fermilab and BNL, we managed to produce a new reusable search module for Indico, backed by Elasticsearch. The backend of this module is based on Citadel, an Invenio-based microservice which is made possible by our colleagues in IT-CDA-WF and IT-CDA-DR. Many thanks to them for this cross-section collaboration which will greatly benefit the community as a whole!

The main advantages of this new search interface, from the user’s point of view, are:

  • New Indico-native interface - an interface which is integrated with Indico in a tighter way (as opposed to the previous one, which was “embedded” into the tool);
  • New text-based search options - you can search by based on a specific field, by prefixing your keyword with field:. For instance, to look for all events named “Indico developers review meeting”, you would write title:"Indico developers review meeting";
  • You can now search within Notes/Minutes - this is along-awaited feature which is now made possible by this new search engine;
  • We now allow adding groups/roles as “authorized abstract submitters”;
  • Paper peer reviewing data and editables can now be exported to JSON.


User avatars in more places

Back in Indico 2.3 we first allowed you to set your own profile photo/gravatar/identicon. We are now extending its usage to more parts of the application:

  • Lists of participants in Meetings;
  • Reviewing timelines;
  • Event logs;
  • User menu in newer interfaces.



Password checks

If you are running Indico with local accounts, you will be happy to know that it now checks user passwords against the haveibeenpwned API. Firstly, whenever your users try to use a password which has been compromised, Indico will refuse to take it.

Then, if a password currently being used by a user is compromised, they will be asked to change it next time they log in.

Other nice things

  • Contribution duration fields now use a widget similar to the time picker that makes selecting durations easier;
  • iCal/ICS files can now be automatically attached to registration confirmation and event reminder emails;
  • Lots of fixes in iCal support - ICS files now include contact data, event logo URL and, when exporting sessions/contributions, the UID of the corresponding event;
  • There are new meeting themes with numbered entries (standard_numbered and standard_numbered_inline_minutes).

Python 3 🐍

Although this is an important change, it is one which is practically invisible to regular users. Indico is now using Python 3.9, abandoning the deprecated 2.7 version. In order to celebrate this transition, we decided to increase Indico’s major version number to 3.

We hope you will enjoy Indico 3!