Confluence 4.0-m36 EAP Release Notes

_development_releases_archive

On this page

Still need help?

The Atlassian Community is here for you.

Ask the community

1 August 2011

Today we are happy to announce our third public EAP build for Confluence 4.0. An Early Access Preview (EAP) release is a snapshot of our work in progress, primarily focused on allowing Confluence users to see the new features in advance and provide us with some useful feedback. It also gives plugin developers an opportunity to test and fix their plugins in advance of an official release.

Please see previous 4.0 EAP release notes for the complete list of 4.0 changes:

Highlights of Confluence 4.0 EAP:

More:

Downloading the Confluence 4.0 EAP

The Confluence 4.0-m36 EAP Release is available here. When upgrading, please follow the upgrade notes below.

Unable to render {include} The included page could not be found.

Highlights of this Milestone

 

New Confluence Installer

Much to the delight of any sysadmins that are installing any new instances of Confluence, the Windows (.exe) and Linux (.bin) guided installers are now available.

Simplified Installation Process

  • Guided installer: The guided install wizard has been implemented for Confluence 4.0 on both Windows and Linux operating systems. Installing a new instance is a breeze.
  • Windows UAC support: You will be prompted for elevated privileges in order to permit the full array of install options. 
  • New instance vs Upgrade selection: You can choose to install a new instance or upgrade an existing instance (the upgrade capability will be available in a subsequent release)
  • Install & Home directory selection: Default folders are provided depending on the user being an admin/root or standard user (based on respective OS write permissions) 
  • Port selection: The ports in Confluence have changed! Take note: The default running port is now 8090 with the control port at 8009
  • Install as a service: Assuming you have elevated privileges, you have the option on both Windows and Linux to install Confluence as a service. This is practical for production instances.
  • Evaluation license generation: As a recap we added a simplified workflow in Confluence 3.5 to assist in generating licenses for evaluators.

Sample screenshots below:

Easy JIRA Integration

  • Setup wizard process improvements: Hook up Confluence with JIRA right within the in-app setup wizard (huge thanks to the Integration team for taking this work on)

 

 

Improved Image Handling

Turn Images Into Links
Now you can turn images into links. This is especially handy for turning images into a button like the Docs team is known to do. (Previously this was only available in wiki markup but can now be done in the shiny new Confluence 4.0 editor via the properties panel.) - We're still working on the link icon.

New Default Image Sizes
We've gotten a lot of feedback that there isn't much difference between the pre-set image sizes. So we've tweaked the sizes so you can choose from a wider range of options. Small remains the same at 100px, medium has increased slightly to 300px and large is now 500px.

Custom image sizes
If you don't like the pre-set image sizes you can now specify an exact image width:

 

Links Dialog: Remember My Tab

Some of the feedback you gave us:

...I find it frustrating that "add a web link" is an extra click away after I open the link dialog. I use that at least as often as I link to another confluence page...

We've taken some of the pain out of this by having the link browser remember the last tab you clicked. So if always use web links, it will always open to the web links tab for you. We're investigating taking this a step further by allowing users to insert a web link from the "search tab as well."

 

Improved Conflict Merging

This feature is back into Confluence 4.0. Now if you're editing a page at the same time as someone else, Confluence will intelligently merge your changes with the other person's change when you save. This means you'll be seeing the "another user has made changes to this page since you started editing" warning a lot less often. We've also made merging table conflicts much more reliable.

 

Set Page Location On Save

We've heard a lot of feedback from new users that understanding where their page fits in the Confluence page hierarchy is not very intuitive. To help solve this problem when you create a new page and save it, users will be prompted and asked where they would like to save the page.

 

Infrastructure changes

  • Remove 'Thumbnail maximum height' and 'Thumbnail maximum width' settings from the General Configuration page
  • Update upgrade task to blow away thumbnails directory
  • Link browser is no longer build in GWT and is in core JavaScript 
  • Upgrade Plugins to 2.8.0
  • Integration Platform 2.12
  • Update personal sidebar preference to use browser local storage instead of cookies

 

We Welcome Your Feedback

To make it easy for you to provide EAP feedback we've created a simple "Got Feedback" button in the Confluence navigation bar:
Let the Confluence team know what you think of the EAP by providing feedback!

Important Note - Comments Editor

You will notice in this milestone we have a new, simplified comments design. Please note - this design was experimental for internal dogfooding and will not be shipping in Confluence 4.0. It will be removed in the next EAP release.

Upgrade Notes

  • Upgrading from a previous version of Confluence. Follow the normal upgrade instructions to upgrade your test instance to this release. We strongly recommend that you back up your Confluence Home directory and your database before upgrading.
  • When upgrading from a previous version of Confluence, if you have customized your cache settings (as documented in Cache Performance Tuning) then you may run into memory problems during the wiki to XHTML migration. We are working to fix this in a later milestone release but in the meantime you can revert your ehcache.xml to the default version.
    • If you still experience problems you should try reducing the 'maxElementsInMemory' attribute on each cache to a very small value such as 50.
    • Note that any cache changes you make to work around migration problems should only be considered temporary. You should restore caching to it's original settings again after migration has been successful.
  • Note that the 'Edit Page in Word' functionality of Confluence is being removed in Confluence 4.0.



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

Last modified on May 27, 2016

Was this helpful?

Yes
No
Provide feedback about this article
Powered by Confluence and Scroll Viewport.