1 June 2009

Highlights of Confluence 3.0

Now you can choose from Confluence's plugin-based macros and implement them with ease, from a single point.

• Using the macro browser's fast filtering capabilities, you can quickly find any bundled macro, including additional plugin-based macros installed on your Confluence system.
• Select your macro and modify and preview its parameters before adding it to your Confluence page or blog post.
  
  

Confluence's enhanced user profiles area has been augmented to incorporate Confluence 3.0's new community-based features and to improve the overall user experience.

• User profiles now allow users to enter 'structured' information about themselves, which can be used by Confluence's community-based features.
• Each user's profile view shows a list of their own recent activities, such as page or blog post updates, changes to their profile information and status updates (described below).
• A summary of each user's profile information is displayed in a 'profile sidebar' on the right-hand side of pages within their personal space and their blog posts too. The profile sidebar appears on pages based on the default Confluence theme.

The new user profile view

The new profile sidebar which appears on your blog posts or pages within your personal space

The new network feature helps you keep track of what other users are doing throughout your Confluence site, by allowing you to 'follow' their recent activities.

• The activities tracked by the network feature include:
  • Additions or edits to pages or blog posts, including comments of users you are following.
  • Updates to statuses or profile details of users you are following.
• From the network view, you can set up an RSS feed which provides notifications on the activities of users you are following.

User status allows you to broadcast a short message of up to 140 characters rapidly for others to see.

• Your messages could include anything from what you are currently working on to a message or a hyperlink you want to share immediately with other users.
• Other users can see your status messages on various activity streams throughout Confluence and on your profile views and personal space pages.
• Take a look at our documentation for more details on the new user status feature and your status updates page.

Hover profile is a convenient tool that provides quick access to key information about other Confluence users, their user profile features and their network functions. Whenever you hover your mouse pointer over a Confluence user's name, key details about them appears in a popup balloon, such as their name, profile picture, email address and their current status.

• From a user's hover profile popup balloon, you can access the following functions:
  • Follow the user to track their recent activities via your network (or stop following them).
  • Directly send the user an email message via your email client.
• You can also access the following features of their user profile via their hover profile popup:
  • The user's personal space.
  • The user's profile, network or status updates views.

The enhanced PDF export feature in Confluence 3.0 has been rebuilt from the ground up and provides full customization of your PDF exports with CSS modifications, to suit your particular requirements.

• Key enhancements to PDF export customizations include the ability to:
  • Customize page and margin sizes.
  • Add a table of contents or add headers and footers with customizable content.
  • Add a title page to your document.
  • Select a subsection of a space (for example, a chapter or section) to export more easily.
• PDF exports are now up to four times faster on large spaces.
• This feature addresses some of the most highly voted Confluence issues. Important bugs in the old PDF export feature have been fixed in this new version, including:
  • Fixed width columns — Table columns were consistently presented with fixed widths using the old PDF export function. However, the new PDF export function presents table columns with variable widths, as they appear on screen.
  • Ability to handle landscape page exports.
• Take a look at our documentation for more details on the enhanced PDF export and PDF stylesheet features.

The old PDF export function only generated fixed-width table columns

The new PDF export feature now generates variable-width table columns

Easily add a title page when you export a space as a PDF

A table of contents is generated in the PDF by default when you export a space

It's easy to add custom headers and footers

The rich text editor contains several interface enhancements and bug fixes that improve its overall user experience.

• The rich text editor includes a right-click context menu, making it easier to insert links, images, macros and tables into your Confluence page or blog post.
• It is now possible to cut/copy and paste rows.
• Take a look at our documentation for more details on the rich text editor overview to see more information about its enhancements and redesigned interface.

Right-click context menu

A number of performance improvements have been implemented.

• Confluence is now able to use more available resources under high load conditions.
• For Confluence installations, actions are up to 2 times faster.
• For Confluence Clustered installations:
  • Viewing pages is up to 2.5 times faster under medium, high and peak load.
  • Other actions are up to 5 times faster under medium load and 10 times faster under high and peak load.

Confluence installations - Medium Load

• Confluence 3.0 now implements the Atlassian Plugin Framework 2.2 and the new Shared Access Layer (SAL).
• For more information, please refer to the Plugin Framework Documentation.

Confluence contains a number of improvements to its administrative features, many of which are easily accessible from the Administration Console.

• Security improvements:
  • A new form token authentication mechanism provides Confluence with the means to validate the origin and intent of requested actions, thus adding an additional level of security against phenomena such as cross-site request forgery. This feature also provides a mechanism for Confluence plugin developers to protect their plugins. For more information, please refer to the for token handling documentation.
  • Anti-XSS mode is now enabled by default and the remaining encoding bugs have been fixed.
• You can now generate a thread dump from the Administration Console. 
• It is now possible to adjust the size of Confluence's internal caches, allowing administrators to fine tune Confluence's cache handling and performance at runtime without the need to restart Confluence.
• The Office connector contains additional configuration options and provides simplified handling of the {viewfile} macro for the new Macro Browser.

Page comparisons have been improved such that deletions or additions of single words (and short phrases) within a single line are highlighted red or green, respectively. Furthermore, large sections of unchanged text are compacted to reduce page length, but their content and context can easily be revealed at a click.

• Page comparisons now appear in email notifications, whenever a user edits a page or blog post.
• As well as the enhanced PDF export feature, you can now choose a subsection of a space (such as a document chapter) more easily, to export to XML or HTML.
• Using the new network, profile and user status list macros, you can incorporate components of Confluence 3.0's new community-based features directly into your page or blog post.
• Atlassian now provides support for recently added features to the widget macro, which include Widgetbox, Yahoo Video, Dailymotion, Wufoo HTML Form Builder, DabbleDB, Google Calendar and BackType micro-blogging.
• The Activity Macros now incorporate improved handling of the 'author' parameter.

Page comparisons in email notifications

Known Issues in this Release

We have an enthusiastic and dedicated group of testers and customers who jump in there, try out the new Confluence release, and report any problems so that we can fix them quickly.

We would like to highlight a known issue affecting the rich text editor, in which text cannot be added to the end of line that already ends with a link. Refer to CONF-15053 for more information about this issue. For more information on other known issues associated with the release of Confluence 3.0, please refer to Confluence 3.0 Known Issues.

A big thank you to everyone who helps us ensure that Confluence keeps getting better and better.

The Confluence 3.0 Team