Confluence 3.5-m2 ("Milestone 2") Release Notes
For testing use only
Do not use this release to upgrade your production systems.
This release is a public development release ('milestone') leading up to the next Confluence major release. Development releases are a snapshot of our work in progress, allowing our customers and especially plugin developers to see what we're up to.
Who should upgrade?
Development releases are not production ready. Development releases are snapshots of the ongoing Confluence development process. While we try to keep these releases stable, they have not undergone the same degree of testing as a full release, and could contain features that are incomplete or may change or be removed before the next full release.
No upgrade path. Because development releases represent work in progress, we cannot provide a supported upgrade path between development releases, or from any development release to a final release. You may not be able to migrate any data you store in a Confluence development release to a future Confluence release.
Atlassian does not provide support for development releases.
In supplying milestone releases, our aim is to provide plugin developers with an opportunity to see the latest changes in the code.
Each milestone release has passed all our automatic tests and has been used for one week on our official internal Confluence server. Most of the issues solved have been reviewed too, and all of our milestone releases even have been performance tested for a while.
However, since our milestones releases are timeboxed (that is, they are released every two weeks, no matter how far we have come implementing features and bugfixes) there is always a chance that we have new known bugs that are scheduled to be fixed in the next milestone, or completely new bugs unknown even to us.
Additionally, we have not completed our performance testing and compatibility testing for all supported databases and user management systems. So, for example, a milestone release may behave well on a small installation but show severe problems when subjected to many users.
Upgrade Procedure
Follow the normal upgrade instructions to upgrade your test instance to this release. We strongly recommend that you backup your Confluence home directory and database before upgrading!
Downloads
All development releases are available from the development releases page on the Atlassian website.
Previous Milestone(s)
Features
Improved Notifications
Autowatch your content
How many times have you created a page or blog post and then forgot to watch it? Confluence now lets you automatically watch any pages you add, edit or comment on. This is turned on by default for all new users and upgraded users (yes, that means you!), and you can turn off autowatch via your Email Settings page.
Enabling this setting will improve your ability to keep track of your contributions on the wiki:
- Automatically watch any page/blog post that you add
- Automatically watch any page/blog post that you edit
- By default, have the the 'watch this page' checkbox ticked when you write a new comment.
Easier to stop watching content
Getting too many emails from Confluence? In this milestone, we've made it much easier to stop watching pages, spaces and users. When you get a notification email now, (most of the time) there's a handy link at the bottom allowing you to quickly unsubscribe from your existing watches. The link will change depending on why you got the email in the first place (e.g. whether you were watching the space, page or network).
The link takes you straight to your Manage Watches page (for space and page watches) or to your network page (for users you follow) and gives you a prompt to easily remove the appropriate watch:
These notification improvements are the result of a 20% project by Anna Katrina Dominguez, who joined our team earlier this year. The project is still a work-in-progress, so please let us know what you think as per the Feedback section below.
Multimedia Macro
Previously, the only way to embed multimedia items (videos and audio) in Confluence was through Wiki Markup. This milestone introduces a new multimedia macro so you can embed multimedia using the macro browser, eliminating the dependency on wiki markup. The first cut of this macro only supports SWF files but we will be adding support to more formats and advanced settings in later milestones. This macro is available via Autocomplete for Macros and the Macro Browser.
Small Improvements
- Previously, it was not possible to differentiate between two gadgets with the same name and description. We've now updated the macro browser to show a gadget's URL so users can more easily distinguish between gadgets with the same name and description (CONF-17991):
Note: This still style will change slightly in a later milestone. - Minor UI tweaks:
- Black headings on the dashboard for consistency with other Atlassian applications
- All dialog close and cancel buttons have now been changed to links
- When adding a new user macro, the template field is shown pre-populated with a simple example
- Prototype and Scriptaculous libraries have been removed. This can lead to a minor improvement in page load time.
- The number of images requested on the dashboard have been reduced leading to a small improvement in dashboard load time.
Performance Fixes
- Re-enabled caching of PropertySet results. This will allow high performance lookups of UserPreferences once again.
- Added caching for plugin module descriptors inside the plugin framework. All callers of the PluginAccessor methods that return these objects should see a noticeable improvement in lookup time.
With these fixes, page rendering is now much faster than m1 – more than 100ms in our own testing – and roughly on par with 3.4.x. Work continues to make performance even better.
Bugfixes
- CGP-153: Gadget security token is "malformed" when page is open for a long time
- CGP-155: Gadget dialog close button should be a link
Known issues
- CONFDEV-1742: Lots of error messages generated until reindex is completed
- CONFDEV-1752: Card and deck macros no longer work properly
- CONFDEV-1686: Unless you've come from an email link, the Watches page always shows 'You have already stopped watching "null".'
Feedback
We'd love to hear any feedback you have from testing this milestone of Confluence. Please raise any issues you discover in our issue tracker against the Confluence project with affects-version "3.5 (EAP)", or comment on this page.