Upgrading from 3.5 to 5.1 - Upgrade Notes

Upgrading from Confluence 3.5 to 5.1 - Simplified Guide

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This page is a summary of the Upgrade Notes released for 4.0 and newer versions. If you wish, you can still see the complete notes for each version below:

Preparing your team for Confluence 5

Confluence 5.0 introduces a number of significant changes to the user experience: A new way of creating content, a redesigned header, a new sidebar, and other changes to the look and feel of your site. People in your organization will need to be aware of the coming changes, so that they can plan and prepare for them. We have written a guide to help you: Planning for Confluence 5.

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In addition, if you are upgrading from Confluence 3.5 or earlier please note that the change to the Confluence editing experience is significant. See the guide to Planning for Confluence 4.

Integration and Supported Platforms

Team Calendars 3.1 or later required

If you are using the Team Calendars add-on for Confluence, you will need to upgrade to Team Calendars 3.1 or later. Earlier versions of this add-on will not work with the new design in Confluence 5.0.

End of support for Java 6

As previously announced, from this release onwards we no longer offer support for Java 6 (JRE and JDK 1.6). Please see End of Support Announcements for Confluence.

End of support for Tomcat 5.5

As previously announced, from this release onwards we no longer offer support for Tomcat 5.5.x. Please see End of Support Announcements for Confluence.

Complete List of Supported Platforms

See the complete list of supported platforms for Confluence 5 at Supported Platforms.

Upgrade Process and Effects

Content updates after upgrade

You will notice once you upgrade to Confluence 5.0, every page will have been edited during the migration process. This manifests itself in the appearance of changes to every page's content by various different users. When migrating pages, Confluence will show the same username that last contributed to your content as the author of the change. This is the upgrade task of migrating your wiki page storage format to XHTML from Wiki Markup. Do not be alarmed by this. This will only happen once for all current versions of content. This will not trigger email notifications, but will update your RSS feeds. Where possible, a change comment of "Upgraded to Confluence 4" will be added to pages and blog posts.

User macros migration

After upgrading, user macros will not be able to be inserted until they have defined macro parameters. See User Macro Template Syntax. Defining macro parameters will mean that they can once again insert these user macros.

Email notifications

With the update of the email templates, the textual content of the notifications has also changed. These wording changes may invalidate any email filters set up to label or organize your email notifications.

Plain text emails no longer available

Emails are now only available in HTML format, which allows for the display of images and formatted content, such as changes made and the full content of the updated page or blog post.

Checking for known issues and troubleshooting the Confluence upgrade

After you have completed the steps required to upgrade your Confluence installation, check all the items on the Confluence post-upgrade checklist to ensure that everything works as expected. If something is not working correctly, please check for known Confluence issues and try troubleshooting your upgrade as described below:

  • Check for known issues. Sometimes we find out about a problem with the latest version of Confluence after we have released the software. In such cases we publish information about the known issues in the Confluence Knowledge Base.
  • Check for answers from the community. Other users may have encountered the same issue. You can check for answers from the community at Atlassian Community.
  • Did you encounter a problem during the Confluence upgrade? Please refer to the guide to troubleshooting upgrades in the Confluence Knowledge Base.

Last modified on Oct 13, 2023

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