Confluence 2.6 Upgrade Guide
Confluence 2.6 brings many popular features which save you time and improve the your wiki's usability. Upgrading to Confluence 2.6 is free for all customers with active Confluence software maintenance as at 27th September 2007.
A new theme brings a fresh, clean look and feel. This is for our customers who have asked for a friendlier interface and improved readability. We've included more social networking features, to enhance the sense of community in your wiki. For example, author photos are now shown in comments and in the 'Recent Updates' on the Dashboard. And the Social Bookmarking plugin is now shipped with Confluence, allowing you to share bookmarks with your team.
Other popular new features include default content for spaces, labels on templates, the ability to backdate or rename news items (blog posts), official MySQL 5.0 support and PDF export of images.
Upgrade Notes
Draft Pages
All draft pages will be discarded during the upgrade process. Confluence administrators should warn users of the Confluence site that drafts will not survive the upgrade.
Plugins
If you are using any third-party plugins, please test them thoroughly before rolling 2.6 into production.
For plugin developers: the Joda-time library has been upgraded from 0.98 to 1.4 in Confluence 2.6. Plugins that use the date formatting or parsing functionality of Joda-time will need to be recompiled to work with Confluence 2.6.
Custom Themes
Custom Confluence 2.5.x themes are expected to be compatible with 2.6 without authors needing to make any change to their existing themes. This is because Confluence will, by default, include all Confluence 2.5.x specific styles automatically. But if you would like to upgrade your theme to use the latest Confluence 2.6 style and typography, you will need to update the way you include stylesheets in your theme.
Custom Page Layout
- If a space uses a custom decorator page layout, the new Confluence 2.6 decorator is not applied. This may causes GUI oddities, such as:
- On a page, the View, Edit, Info and Attachments tabs are shown as a vertical bulleted list instead of tabs.
- Comments do not show properly.
Fix: Apply the Default Page Layout, then re-insert the custom code.
- In addition, if you are using pagetree navigation to form a table of contents on the left, you may find that your wiki text becomes italic after upgrading to Confluence 2.6.
- Cause: To create the left-hand panel, you have probably inserted a chunk of HTML/CSS in the space's page layout. The chunk of code may use a
<blockquote>element to align the body of the page and draw a blue line on its left. Confluence 2.6 stylesheets apply the italic style to blockquotes. - Fix: Use a new format for your left-hand panel.
- Cause: To create the left-hand panel, you have probably inserted a chunk of HTML/CSS in the space's page layout. The chunk of code may use a
Steps in detail:
- Go to the Space Admin screen and click 'Edit' to view your customized Page Layout.
- Copy the customized code.
- Cancel the edit.
- Click 'Reset Default' to apply the new Confluence 2.6 default page layout.
- If you are using the
pagetreenavigation panel, edit your customized code as described above. - On the Space Admin screen, click 'Create Custom' to create a custom page layout.
- Reinsert your customized code and click 'Save'.
Upgrade Procedure
Upgrading Confluence should be pretty easy. We strongly recommend that you backup your confluence.home directory and database before upgrading!
You can get the latest version of Confluence here.
If you are upgrading from Confluence 2.2.x or a later version, you can find instructions here.
If you are upgrading directly from 2.1 or earlier, you should also read the 2.2 Release Notes for warnings about the 2.1 -> 2.2 upgrade.