Atlassian is proud to announce the release of Confluence 2.2, otherwise known as Shoalhaven Existing customers who wish to upgrade, or new users who wish to try out Confluence for 30 days, can download Confluence from the Atlassian website: http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluenceShoalhaven is the seventh major update to Confluence (in two years!). It introduces 'personal spaces', support for localization/internationalization, CAPTCHA spam protection, a multitude of new extension points for plugin developers, a simpler LDAP configuration syntax, and more.

Upgrading from 2.1

Upgrading Confluence should be pretty easy: you can find instructions here. We strongly recommend that you backup your confluence.home directory and database before upgrading!

Upgrading from 2.0 and earlier

Users upgrading directly from 2.0 or earlier should also read the 2.1 Release Notes for caveats regarding the 2.0 -> 2.1 upgrade.

Contents

1. New Features
2. Improvements
3. Notable Bug-fixes
4. Important note for MySQL users

See also: Issues Resolved for 2.2

New Features

Personal Spaces

Two of the most frequent questions we get from Confluence customers have been: "How do I give my users their own wiki?" and "How do I give my users their own blog?" It seems everybody needs a little Personal Space.

Personal spaces belong to particular users, and rather than being listed on the dashboard, are available from the user's profile. (Future versions of Confluence will feature a 'people browser' to make it easier to discover the interesting personal spaces on your server). They can contain pages and news items like any other space, be searched and browsed. They can be kept private, or opened up so the whole world can view and edit them, just like global spaces.

Confluence's search and RSS builder interfaces have been updated to make it easy to choose whether you're interested in personal spaces or not.

Oh, and if you create a personal space, don't forget to upload (or choose) your own profile picture, so people can see who you are.

Localization/Internationalization

Confluence now supports drop-in language packs to change the language of the user interface. The global administrator can select a default language for the entire site, while individual users can set their preferred language in their preferences.

No language packs are currently available, but we are currently working with our global partners so we can begin to provide translations. If you are interested in translating Confluence into another language, you can find instructions on building a language pack here: Language Module.

CAPTCHA Support

Many of the more public Confluence wikis have been suffering at the hands of spammers. CAPTCHA support adds the familiar 'type in this word' question to signup, edit and comment forms, to defeat automated spamming bots. You can turn on CAPTCHA from the global administrative console, and also choose which users will, or will not be subject to the spam check.

Plugin Improvements

Each version of Confluence is more customizeable than the last. One of the most exciting things to come from our recent plugin competition was learning just how creative our plugin developers are, and discovering more ways we can help them add features to Confluence.

• Job Module and Trigger Module allow you to schedule periodic tasks to run within Confluence
• Web UI Modules allow plugin developers to add new links, buttons and tabs to the Confluence interface, and make it easier for theme developers to stay up to date with changes to the Confluence UI.
• Code Formatting Module allow you to plug support for new languages into the {code} macro (or override the existing language support with something better).

We've also made a number of improvements to the plugin system, including:

• Making sure that a single 'rogue' plugin can't bring down the whole plugin subsystem.
• Enabling 'conditional get' for plugin resources, so browsers don't download them again and again.
• Fixing problems that may occur when a servlet or component plugin is reloaded or upgraded. (With many thanks to Dan Hardiker of Adaptavist.)

New atlassian-user Configuration Syntax

As promised, we have cleaned up the configuration file syntax for our atlassian-user user management library. This should make it much easier to configure Confluence to use external user repositories such as LDAP. 

Improvements

Permissions Changes

In Confluence 2.1 and earlier, permissions that were assigned to Anonymous users were not automatically assigned to logged-in users, leading to the confusing situation where you could view a page when not logged in, but not view it when you were logged in.

In Confluence 2.2 and later, permissions that are assigned to the Anonymous user are also assigned to all logged in users. The sole exception to this rule is the global Use Confluence permission, which must still be explicitly granted to any user who wishes to log in. (This exception is necessary due to licensing restrictions).

Search

With help from Kelvin Tan, we've overhauled much of the underlying infrastructure of Confluence's search engine. Search in Confluence should now be more efficient, and some searches that were problematic before (such as wildcard* searches) now work as you would expect them to.

LDAP Performance

Confluence's performance against external LDAP user repositories should now be significantly faster.

Other

• The General Configuration screen is much better organized
• You can choose a space's initial permissions and theme when you create it
• The left-navigation theme has improved
• Themes may now be packaged with icons that will be displayed in the theme selector (see the screenshot of the "create personal space" screen above for an example)
• Confluence Standalone is now packaged with Tomcat 5.5
• Atom feeds are now generated to the Atom 1.0 standard
• The back-end storage of attachment files has been changed to resolve a number of problems that were caused when the underlying filesystem did not support the character-set of the attachment filename

Important note for MySQL users

For users using MySQL with Confluence 2.2 (or higher), please ensure that you are using the latest (3.1.12) MySQL Java Connector. Earlier versions of the MySQL connector have a bug which is triggered by improvements in Confluence 2.2. These earlier connector versions will result in an error being recorded in your logs on upgrade (and will result in unstable operation of Confluence)

ERROR [hibernate.tool.hbm2ddl.SchemaUpdate] execute could not complete schema update

You can download the latest MySQL connector from the MySQL Java Connector 3.1 download page. Please be sure that you remove any older versions of the connector from your application server.

The Confluence 2.2 Team