🌻 CryptPad Summer release (2024.6.0)

The summer release is in production on CryptPad.fr and will soon be tagged on GitHub.

This release primarily introduces our new onboarding system! We also include some fixes on accessibility, deployment, OnlyOffice and more.

🔛 Onboarding

We added an onboarding process when running CryptPad for the first time to help administrators in the process of configuring their own instance. Once the first admin account is created, the onboarding guides them to configure the name, description, visual identity of the instance, which applications are available, and enable extra security features. All these options can be changed later on in the administration panel.

This will hopefully ease the installation process of new CryptPad instances.

♿ Accessibility

Following our effort in making CryptPad more accessible, some bugs have been fixed with this release. In particular, if navigating with your keyboard, you can access all the tabbable elements from a document or certain modals.

🎬 CryptPad at FOSS conferences feedbacks

In the past month, Fabrice has been traveling to different free and open-source software-related conferences to present multiple aspects of CryptPad:

• 🦁 Journées du logiciel libre. This event took place in Lyon, and the topic this year was “popular education”. That’s why a talk about CryptPad for research and education was presented: CryptPad was shown as a tool to spread information while safeguarding the privacy of the different actors: both the writers and the readers. This privacy is guaranteed not only against external threats, but also from us (up to reasonable limits) and our open-source policy ensures that anyone can double-check those claims.
  The talk was overall well-received and people were glad to discover that CryptPad is more than just an end-to-end encrypted version of etherpad.
• 🐇 Pas sage en Seine is a privacy-oriented event that covers a large spectrum of topics. This year Fabrice gave a general presentation of CryptPad and its recent advances, such as Blueprints or SSO integration.
  The public was quite interested and some people asked for a CryptPad install-party to test the server installation process using docker, which was thus organized. It was however before the integration of the onboarding process. However, this initiative was a good opportunity to see how easy it is to install CryptPad, and may lead in the future to smoother deployments.
  The talk was recorded and is available here (in French).
• 🐧 OW2 conference. OW2 is a consortium between FOSS actors and they organized a conference near Paris to exchange about the new advances in the open-source community. There was also some breakout sessions, with one about Research, Science and Education. It was there that Fabrice gave a 15 minute speech about CryptPad for research and education, where it fitted well in the session. During those two days, Fabrice was also present at the CryptPad booth to answer the different questions about CryptPad, its usage and, again, the installation process.

This was also relayed in the XWiki blog, which CryptPad is part of. There, you can find links for the different slidedecks.

🔭 Next up

• Andreea will join the team for an internship at the start of the month!
• We will start planning for the autumn release (2024.9.0)
• Fabrice will finish his conference tour at Pass the Salt in Lille on Wednesday, July 3rd. He will present future improvements in CryptPad