Confluence 3.2 Beta Release Notes
These are not the release notes you are looking for! The final Confluence 3.2 Release Notes are over here.
For testing use only
Do not use this release to upgrade your production systems.
This release is a public development release ('milestone') leading up to the next Confluence major release. Development releases are a snapshot of our work in progress, allowing our customers and especially plugin developers to see what we're up to.
Who should upgrade?
Development releases are not production ready. Development releases are snapshots of the ongoing Confluence development process. While we try to keep these releases stable, they have not undergone the same degree of testing as a full release, and could contain features that are incomplete or may change or be removed before the next full release.
No upgrade path. Because development releases represent work in progress, we cannot provide a supported upgrade path between development releases, or from any development release to a final release. You may not be able to migrate any data you store in a Confluence development release to a future Confluence release.
Atlassian does not provide support for development releases.
In supplying milestone releases, our aim is to provide plugin developers with an opportunity to see the latest changes in the code.
Each milestone release has passed all our automatic tests and has been used for one week on our official internal Confluence server. Most of the issues solved have been reviewed too, and all of our milestone releases even have been performance tested for a while.
However, since our milestones releases are timeboxed (that is, they are released every two weeks, no matter how far we have come implementing features and bugfixes) there is always a chance that we have new known bugs that are scheduled to be fixed in the next milestone, or completely new bugs unknown even to us.
Additionally, we have not completed our performance testing and compatibility testing for all supported databases and user management systems. So, for example, a milestone release may behave well on a small installation but show severe problems when subjected to many users.
Upgrade Procedure
Follow the normal upgrade instructions to upgrade your test instance to this release. We strongly recommend that you backup your Confluence home directory and database before upgrading!
Downloads
All development releases are available from the development releases page on the Atlassian website.
Welcome to the Confluence 3.2 Beta program
With great pride we bring to you the Confluence 3.2 Beta release. We still have a few bugs to fix, but overall, this is how 3.2 will get rolled out to customers in mid March. And we want your feedback.
Note to partners and translators: The preliminary translation diff files can be found as a subpage of this overview page: Translations for Confluence Releases
Advance warning
This release is the last one to officially support Internet Explorer 6. Read the upgrade notes and the original announcement over here.
This release is the last one to officially support application servers other than Tomcat. From the next release on, Websphere and Weblogic and JBoss will not be supported anymore. For further information on this, please see the end of support announcements page
Autocomplete in the editor
We are adding a new feature called Autocomplete to the Rich Text Editor. In this beta it only works in Firefox and Safari, but the goal is to make it work on Internet Explorer as well by the time the 3.2 release ships.
You can type "[" at the start of a line to display your browsing history and link to those pages, and if you keep typing you'll get recommendation for pages that match what you types: 
If you type "!" you'll see the attached images to the current page, and if you keep typing you'll be able to link to any image in your deployment.
This feature's goal is to make the RTE even faster than using wiki markup. Try it out and tell us what you think!
Note: May require a re-index of your system to show attachments
Known issues
- CONF-18281 - doesn't work in IE yet
New Links Dialog
We have rewritten the way you add links in Confluence. The new links dialog is faster, better looking, and more powerful.
New "Documentation Theme"
Confluence now comes bundled with our hugely successful "Documentation Theme".
This theme replaces the old "Left Navigation Theme". We are still shipping the Left Nav theme, but it is deprecated and will stop shipping in a later release.
New "Easy Reader" Theme
With today's huge monitors, it can become hard to read large amounts of text that spans the whole screen. We are introducing a new theme which, like most websites, only uses a portion of the screen, to facilitate readability.
This theme replaces the old "Clickr Theme". We are still shipping the Clickr theme, but it is deprecated and will stop shipping in a later release.
Bundled templates and new template marketplace
The Bundled Templates 20% project is actually a framework to allow customers and Atlassian to deploy bundles of templates to a Confluence instance.
3.2 includes the framework plugin and a bundle of default templates[1]; these are available to the administrator to import into their instance as either space templates or global templates.
The templates import framework allows the administrator to preview a template before importing it as well as view the associated wiki-markup.
[1] Current default template bundle will be changed, pending list from Matt and Bill.
Documentation on how to write your own template plugin can be found here: Creating A Template Bundle.
Please visit PAC for the new category.
Better Move Page Dialog
We introduced a new page move dialog in Confluence 3.1 but the ability to change the order of pages fell out of scope. This has now been implemented and is accessed as shown -
And looks like -
REST APIs
New REST Resources
Attachment Resource
Request: https://confluence.example.com/rest/prototype/1/attachment/161<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?> <attachment niceType="Image" version="1" comment="image of Sydney harbour" fileName="harbour.jpg" type="attachment" id="161"> <ownerId>69518087748064278</ownerId> <title>harbour.jpg</title> <lastModifiedDate date="2004-11-21T23:20:18-0600" friendly="Nov 21, 2004"/> <createdDate date="2004-11-21T23:20:18-0600" friendly="Nov 21, 2004"/> </attachment>Some fields removed
More in-depth documentation coming soon.
Useful Improvements and Enhancements
Page History
What used to look like this...
.. now is a bit more understandable:
RTE Shortcuts Added
The following RTE shortcuts have been added, please try them out!
- Ctrl+Shift+C Copy table row
- Ctrl+Shift+X Cut table row
- Ctrl+Shift+V Paste table row
- Ctrl+Shift+B Bullet lists
- Ctrl+Shift+N Numbered lists
- Ctrl+Shift+F Full screen mode
- Ctrl+Shift+S Strikethrough
- Ctrl+Shift+T Insert Table
- Ctrl+Shift+A Macro Browser
RTE Hints
At the bottom of the RTE, useful editor hints get displayed. This will help promote the new keyboard shortcuts and the autocomplete feature.
Images in search results
If an image is found, it will be displayed in the search results. The main point here is that we've made it possible to write plugins to spice up search results. You could write custom display for any kind of attachment types, or even change what the regular pages look like.
Bundled JDBC drivers
To improve the Evaluator experience, we're now bundling a few of the most common JDBC drivers.
Improved RSS feed builder screen
The RSS feed builder looks a bit more polished and less scary.
Bug fixes and stability improvements
A host of old bugs have been fixed. Most notable:
- it is now possible to install language packs without restarting the server.
- When adding new pages or posts, there used to be a white-space overlapping the right part of the editor. This is now fixed.
- Removed many instances of hard-coded colors (mostly blue) that prevented color schemes applying correctly.
- Enhancement for modern browsers: added CSS to handle common forms of over-sized content, so it gets a localized scrollbar instead of making the whole page scroll
- Properly set backgrounds for email and editor popups, so they don't (incorrectly) pick up backgrounds from the main wiki window.