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 ground-breaking 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 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 a long-awaited feature which is now made possible by this new search engine.

Smaller Indico instances that may not need such a powerful search engine and prefer the simplicity of not deploying a separate microservice will also benefit from a basic integrated search.

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.

Mixed categories

In the past categories were restricted to contain either events or subcategories. This is no longer the case; any category may now contain a mix of both events and subcategories. To ease the transition for category managers, the update restricts event creation in all categories that have subcategories, so by default only category managers will be able to create events in those categories.

Other nice things

• We now allow adding groups/roles as “authorized abstract submitters”;
• Paper peer reviewing and Editing data can now be exported to JSON;
• 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;
• When cloning events, surveys may now be cloned as well;
• 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!