Highlights of this Release:

Responding to your Feedback:
210 votes satisfied

• Thank you for all your issues and votes. Keep logging, to help us keep improving!
• Below is a list of the highlights in this release.
• Attached is the full list of issues resolved in this release.

Streamlined Search

• The redesigned Search screen helps you to focus on the search term and results, by simplifying the filter box and other parts of the screen.
• By default, the search now includes all spaces and all content types: pages, news items, comments and so on.
• You can filter the search results by space, content type and date modified.
• If your Confluence site uses the standard out-of-the-box configuration for user management, you can also filter the search results by contributor.
• The search results are weighted to give personal information the highest relevance, followed by pages, news items and the other content types.
• When using the Search macro or the Search API, you can now also filter by contributor.
• Take a look at our documentation for more details on the search and the ranking of search results.

Auto Save

• Confluence automatically saves your work to a draft while you are adding or editing a page.
• Now with release 2.9, a message near the 'Save' button shows the time of the latest auto-save.
• If something goes wrong, retrieve the saved draft easily from the dropdown menu under your name.
• You can read more about drafts in the documentation.

Charts

• The Chart macro presents a sophisticated new look.
• Below are some example charts displayed on a Confluence page.
• The documentation shows you how to add the macro to your page and choose different formats and types.

Page Tree

• The Pagetree macro is now bundled as part of your Confluence installation.
• It displays a dynamic, hierarchical list of pages which you can use as a table of contents or a navigation panel.
• You can choose to include a search box above the tree of pages or on its own.
• New links allow viewers to collapse or expand all branches in the tree at once.
• There are a number of options for specifying the root of the page tree. For example, you can show children of the current page, or children of the current page's parent, or all pages in the space.
• Take a look at the documentation to see the complete list of options.

Gallery

• Use the Gallery macro to display a set of pictures on a page.
• Now you can include or exclude individual pictures, or simply display all the images at once.
• Choose pictures from the current page or another Confluence page.
• Take a look at the documentation for help on these and other options.

• Viewers can click an image to zoom in and view the gallery as a slide show.

New Tutorial

• When you download Confluence and choose to include the sample content, you will receive a new Demonstration Space.
• There's a tutorial for those are new to Confluence or new to wikis.
• Other users will enjoy the advanced topics and links to more information.
• You can use the tutorial as a quick-start guide for new starters in your organization.

More in the Menus

• The Space menu which appeared in Confluence 2.8 has now been renamed to 'Browse'. Faithful Confluence users will recognize and welcome this old friend.
• The Browse menu now includes the People Directory, Space administration and Confluence administration for authorized users.
• You can now reach your personal labels, watches and drafts directly from the dropdown menu under your name on any Confluence page.

Alphabetical Page Ordering

• By default Confluence orders your pages alphabetically, but you can drag and drop them into any order you like.
• Now Confluence 2.9 allows you to reset the page order to alphabetical, just by clicking the icon next to the parent page.
• The documentation tells you more.

Better Spam Prevention

• A new link on the user profile screen allows administrators to jump directly to the user management screen — handy for dealing with those pesky spammers of the human variety.
• We have enhanced Confluence's Captcha functionality to strengthen the barrier against non-human spammers such as bots or web spiders.
• Captcha is now active on user profile pages as well as other pages.
• The image which Captcha displays is now even more difficult for non-humans to read. Take a look at the word 'brihter' in the screenshot below.
• You can read the instructions on configuring Captcha behavior.

Plugin Repository

• The Plugin Repository shows more consistent information about the plugins on your Confluence site, including the system and bundled plugins which are shipped with Confluence.

Engine Room and Developers' Community

• Confluence's request throughput has been improved, thanks to better class- and resource-loading strategies.
• Startup time has also been reduced. This is particularly good for developers and anyone who needs to restart Confluence often.
• The Search API now allows you to filter search results by contributor.
• As part of the ongoing work to make it easier for internal developers and plugin developers to work on Confluence, this release includes re-factorings of some web action classes.
• To improve Confluence's resistance to cross site scripting security vulnerabilities, we have added an experimental automatic HTML entity encoding feature. This is the first step to providing a more secure product by default.

More than 140 Fixes and Improvements

• Take a look at the complete list of issues resolved in Confluence 2.9.

Development

Bugfixing and maintenance
Anatoli Kazatchkov
Brian Nguyen
Chris Broadfoot
Chris Kiehl
Don Willis

Design
Jason Taylor
Stephen Russell

Editor and page tree improvements
Agnes Ro
David Taylor
Dmitry Baranovskiy
Matt Ryall

Engine room
Andrew Lynch
Charles Miller
Christopher Owen
Matthew Jensen

Plugins
Ben Speakmon
Cheryl Jerozal
Jonathan Nolen
Rich Wallace
Ryan Talusan
Tim Moore

David Chui

Product management
Adnan Chowdhury

Search
David Loeng
Paul Curren

Team lead
Per Fragemann

Technical writing
Edwin Dawson
Sarah Maddox

Support

Kuala Lumpur
Arie Murdianto
Azwandi Mohd Aris
David Chui
Fennie Ng
Mei Yan Chan
Ming Giet Chong
Tony Cheah Tong Nyee

San Francisco
Jeremy Largman
Maleko Taylor
Tim Wong
Vincent Chang

Sydney
Ivan Benko
James Fleming
Partha Kamal
Renan Battaglin
Roy Hartono
Ulrich Kuhnhardt