This documentation is intended for Confluence developers who want to ensure that their existing plugins and apps are compatible with Confluence 7.20.

Watch this page to find out when a new milestone is available and what’s changed. We will publish formal release notes once we release a beta.

Latest milestone

Issues with this milestone?

Hit the Feedback button on the Confluence EAP header or raise an issue to tell us about it.

Planned changes

In this section we'll provide an overview of the changes we intend to make, so you can start thinking how it might impact your app. We'll indicate when a change has been implemented, and in which milestone. 

Security uplift

Status: ONGOING

We're continuing to identify and upgrade core components and libraries to the newest versions. We will not break our official APIs. However, certain libraries, transitive dependencies, and behaviours might change.

Injectable skip links

Status: DONE

In this release, we're shipping a number of skip links on our pages and in the editor to improve  accessibility on Confluence. These include "Skip to search", "Skip to main content", "Skip to edit title", "Log in" and more. Check out our keyboard shortcuts to learn how to activate these skip links.

As part of this framework, you can also inject your own skip links to improve the navigational experience for customers using your app in Confluence.

Learn how to inject custom skip links

Change to order of items in the admin navigation

Status: DONE

To improve the organisation and user experience of the Confluence administration sidebar, menu items under each heading will appear in alphabetical order. Headings will continue to be ordered by weight variable.

Change to macros and table display in editor 

Status: DONE

To improve the speed of our editor, we've stopped providing a patch that automatically wraps macros and tables in paragraph tags. This patch fixed a bad editing experience on older browsers. As a result of removing the patch, you may see macros and tables placed right next to each other in the editor. When you publish or preview the page, the table and macro will appear adequately spaced.

Embedded Crowd upgrade

Status: DONE

In this release, we upgraded embedded Crowd to 4.4 in this release.

Lucene and Bonnie API isolation

Status: ADVANCE NOTICE

Access to Lucene API and implementation of Atlassian Bonnie will not be available in Confluence 8.0, to make future Lucene upgrades safe to do as part of future bugfix and feature releases. The following packages will no longer be available in Confluence 8:

• Interfaces and classes in com.atlassian.confluence.search.lucene will no longer exist. To make changes to the index or retrieve information from the index, please use the Search V2 API such as SearchIndexAccessor and SearchManager instead.

• com.atlassian.bonnie.search.Extractor will no longer exist. All extractor modules will need to be migrated to the newer com.atlassian.confluence.plugins.index.api.Extractor2 instead.

Improvements to Search V2 API

Status: DONE

To make the Lucene upgrades seamless in future feature releases, the Search V2 API has been updated as follows:

• SearchFilter interface in the Search V2 API is now deprecated and will be removed from Confluence 8.0. All classes in com.atlassian.confluence.search.v2.searchfilter will also be removed from Confluence 8.0. Replace the usages of these classes with the corresponding SearchQuery classes (their names should be almost the same, with a few exceptions).
• Reminder: Add-on can now create and access its own Lucene index with Search V2 API by using a custom SearchIndexAccessor (already shipped in 7.17).

Hibernate upgrade

Status: ADVANCE NOTICE

We're working on upgrading Hibernate from 5.2 to 5.4 (with the goal to upgrade to 5.6 soon). This upgrade will include breaking changes like removing deprecated features/interfaces.

Notable features that have been removed:

• Support for JDBC parameterised queries. Classes that implement  HibernateContentQueryFactory  should be verified to assure that named parameters are used instead.
  
• RegionAccessStrategy  and other access strategy interfaces have been replaced.

We are targeting our next platform release (8.0) for this work. See Preparing for Confluence 8.0 for the latest updates.

Removing direct access to Hibernate

Status: ADVANCE NOTICE

In Confluence 8.0, we'll also be removing direct access to Hibernate. This will allow us to upgrade Hibernate more frequently without breaking your app, or requiring you to do significant testing and rework when things change. 

Based on our experience updating our own bundled apps, it's quite likely that this change will affect your apps. See Preparing for Confluence 8.0 for more details.

Check out our migration guide which will help you identify where you are using the Hibernate interface, and provide some recommended alternatives for common use cases. 

Removal of editor-v3 

Status: ADVANCE NOTICE

When we upgraded our editor to TinyMCE v4 way back in Confluence 6.14, we introduced an unsupported dark feature that could be used to revert to the v3 editor (frontend.editor.v4 / frontend.editor.v4.disable). We plan to remove this dark feature flag in Confluence 8.0. See Preparing for Confluence 8.0 for more details. 

Introducing object storage for attachment data

Status: ADVANCE NOTICE

With Confluence 8.0, we’ll begin building support for attachment data to be optionally stored on object storage, other than a filesystem such as AWS S3. The nature of this type of data is better served by object storage types, and using this option will improve Confluence's operational experience. As a result, administrators will be able to leverage the native tooling provided by these mediums in addressing scalability issues, backup, restore and disaster recovery.

As part of this work, we’ll initially be cleaning up any attachment-related APIs, making them more generic so that they can cater for both filesystems and object storage-based deployments. As such, APIs that have been deprecated in Confluence 7.x due to not being flexible enough will be removed in Confluence 8.0.

For vendors that operate on attachment files stored in a filesystem, please ensure that you are accessing these attachments through APIs provided in AttachmentManager and don't assume that their location is based on the Hierarchical File System Attachment Storage. See Preparing for Confluence 8.0 for more details. 

Implemented changes

In this section we'll provide details of changes we have implemented, organised by the milestone they are first available in. This will help you decide which milestone to use when testing.

RC 1 - 27 September 2022

7.20.0-rc1

• Minor bug fixes

Beta 4 - 13 September 2022

7.20.0-beta4

• No significant changes in this milestone

Beta 2 - 23 August 2022

7.20.0-beta2

In this beta release:

• Inject your own skip links to make your app more accessible
• Advanced Roadmaps for Jira in Confluence macro has been bundled
• You can enable mail debugging logs
• You can pass JVM arguments through to the Synchrony process
• Changes to Search V2 API to support future Lucene upgrades
• Embedded Crowd upgrade
• Numerous bug fixes and minor improvements

EAP 3 - 15 August 2022

Milestone 7.20.0-m104

• Numerous bug fixes and minor improvements

EAP 2 – 8 August 2022

Milestone 7.20.0-m99

• Numerous bug fixes and minor improvements

EAP 1 – 1 August 2022

Milestone 7.20.0-m78

• Prevent non-admin users from exporting spaces to XML
• Items in the admin navigation now appear in alphabetical order 
• Upgrade to Analytics 7.x
• Numerous bug fixes and minor improvements