We've put together some quick tips on how Administrators can prepare for Confluence 4:

1. Stay Updated On The Latest Docs

Watch the Planning for Confluence 4 page. We will update that page with more resources as we make further progress -  so make sure you stay updated!

2. Download, install and trial Confluence 4

We strongly encourage you to set aside some time to download and install the latest version of Confluence 4.x. You can be better prepared by conducting an upgrade of your data in a test environment to see how the upgrade goes. Don't forget to get your internal users (especially the power users) to try Confluence 4. Ask them to go to their complex pages and see what they look like in the new editor and get feedback from them.

3. Give us feedback!

We really would love your feedback as you trial Confluence 4. We've made it really easy to do so. All you have to do is simply click the "Got Feedback" button you see in the Confluence toolbar:

This feedback will go directly to the Confluence team.

(info) If you need support, please get in touch with our legendary support department at support.atlassian.com.

4. Upgrade your user macros - Now!

With the introduction of Confluence 4, all macros that are inserted in the editor will need to be entered using Macro Autocomplete, or through the Macro Browser. This includes User Macros too!

However, a problem with User Macros in the past was that the only way to insert them was if you knew what parameters were available - and that wasn't documented anywhere. 

Now, if you are running Confluence 3.4 or higher, we introduced the ability for an Administrator to make their user macros visible in the Macro Browser and Macro Autocomplete. So the good news is you can prepare for that now, without having to wait for your Confluence 4 upgrade. How do you do this? You will need to define parameters for your user macros. All the documentation on how to do this can be found here. We've also created two examples to help you get started.

(warning) Important: This is required to enable user macros in Confluence 4.

6. Test your plugins

Although not all plugins are compatible with Confluence 4 yet, you can still test a majority of your plugins in Confluence 4. We strongly recommend you try this and let Atlassian know if there are any issues. This is really important especially if you have custom plugins that you've built internally.

(question)  How do I migrate my plugins to Confluence 4? All this information for plugin developers can be found from the Planning for Confluence 4 landing page.

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9 Comments

  1. Ole Kværnø

    #1 should be, check if

    • users of Confluence will miss wiki markup. In 4.0 only the WYSIWYG-editor is available, and no rollback to 3.5 is to my knowledge supported.

    • some users will miss editing wiki pages using small screen devices.
      (warning) the Insert wiki dialog is locked at 800x600 pixels

  2. Anonymous

    Is it right, that i cannot use wiki-markup in user macros?

    What´s the solution, if i used another plugin (mail-form) inside the user-macro?

    Thanks for help!

    Nils

    1. Joerg Bencke

      See Pauls answers here : Up until a proper editor is in place to allow usermacro editing, wik markup will be left active as "acceptable" input. Still, they advise you to convert to xhmtl for usermacros. 

      In the article, paul gives following tip as workaround .. YET ... in 4.1.3 I tried that and the XHTML is not converted! I had to manually transform the XHTML to WikiMarkup (sad)

      • create a wiki page and design your usermacro 
      • "view storag source" of the wiki page (use 'view-storage-format' plugin for that
      • copy n paste the XHTML code over to the user macro section
      (here my step came in)
      • transform xhtml to wikimarkup manually : 
        • { 
        • macro name from xhtml
        • :
        • parametername from xhtml
        • = 
        • value
        • }
        • content body
        • {
        • macroname from xhtml
        • }

      I am afraid the same is true for theme configurations, dashbord etc. - "waiting for THE editor" is the way to go.

  3. hans-peter.geier

    the "Latest Doc" link take me to Confluence 5.0 documentation now!!  I do want to see 4.0 documentation when I click a link from inside of 4.0 documentation, not thrown over to 5.0!

    I'm really having problems to find the adequate 4.3 documentation pages now!!

    Please link "latest" to 4.3  and something like "future" or "next version" to 5.0 documentation. After all, you have not released 5.0 yet, haven't you?

    And even if, many of your customers have not yet upgraded to 4.x, and won't do so for some more months.

     

    (failed stupid captha challence 1...2...

    1. SarahA

      Hallo Hans-Peter

      I'm sorry to hear that the version control on the documentation is confusing. The page for Confluence 4.3 is here: https://confluence.atlassian.com/display/CONF43/Quick+Administrator+Tips+To+Prepare+for+Confluence+4

      We have released a few EAP (early access programme) releases of Confluence 5.0. This documentation space is aligned with those releases. The latest public release at this point is Confluence 5.0-rc1 Release Notes

      I hope this helps.

      Cheers, Sarah

      1. hans-peter.geier

        Hi Sarah,

        thanks for your quick reply.

        When you go to this page you mentioned, after {{Now, if you are running Confluence 3.4 or higher, we introduced the ability for an Administrator to}} there are 3 links in the remaining paragraph which refer to "DOC" instead of "CONF43", so readers are taken directly to the Confluence 5.0 documentation instead of staying inside of the 4.3 documentation space.

        There are many other cases like this on other 4.x related documentation pages.

        Regards,

        Hans-Peter

         

        (failed to pass the stupid captcha challenge  1 .... 2 .... 3 ....

        1. SarahA

          Hallo Hans-Peter

          Thanks for pointing out those links. The problem is caused when someone adds an absolute link (full URL) instead of a relative link (page name only). In more recent versions of Confluence, Confluence is clever enough to change absolute links to relative when within the same space.

          I've fixed the CONF43 page. I've also changed this page (in the DOC space) so that the links are relative. From now on, when we create an archive version of this space the links will point to pages within the same space.

          Yeah, the captcha thing is a pain. We thought we'd fixed it, but it got broken again in a subsequent release. The dev team are on it!

          Cheers, Sarah

          1. hans-peter.geier

            Hi Sarah,

            The problem is caused when someone adds an absolute link (full URL) instead of a relative link (page name only)

            I don't know yet how Confluence 4.3 editor is behaving, but in 3.5 I know that the editor itself did add the space name in front of the page name, unnecessarily, which made moving pages across spaces a real pain. It might be worthwhile to investigate whether this behavior of the editor has been improved, or whether this weekness got also ported to 4.x.....     In short,  the "someone" may be the editor (or its save routine) itself, possibly.

            Yeah, the captcha thing is a pain. We thought we'd fixed it, but it got broken again in a subsequent release. The dev team are on it!

            Why does Atlassian doesn't turn this feature off until the issue is fixed?  This is a one-click action of your system administrator, which would end all this frustration among your document system users (commentors) and stop exposing this bug to the user community (and demonstrate how long it takes Atlassian to fix a bug)

             

            1... 2... 3...

  4. Alan Feldman

    What happened to section 5?

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