Confluence 5.5-m19 EAP Release Notes
Atlassian is pleased to announce Confluence 5.5 milestone 19 (m19). This is the second public milestone release of Confluence 5.5 and provides a snapshot of our continued work on Confluence's clustering solution.
This EAP (early access program) release is a snapshot of our work in progress, primarily focused on giving plugin developers an opportunity to test and fix their plugins in advance of an official release. Feel free to comment on the page if you want to provide any feedback or ask any questions.
What's in this release?
Downloading Confluence
The Confluence 5.5-m19 release is available at the download site. When upgrading, please follow the upgrade notes below.
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.
Highlights of this release
This milestone contains a snapshot of our work on Confluence's clustering solution and is provided to allow plugin developers time to ensure their plugins are cluster compatible ahead of Confluence 5.6. See Starting a Confluence cluster on a single machine for information on how to set up an environment for testing purposes.
Note that Confluence 5.5 will not include a clustered artifact, and customers wishing to set up a cluster in production will need to continue to use Confluence 5.4. We hope to make the new Confluence clustering solution available with Confluence 5.6.
Shared home directory for clustered installations
We have introduced the concept of a shared home directory for clustered installations. All cluster nodes will now need to be configured with a path to a directory that is shared between all nodes.
Plugin developers will need to decide the most appropriate place to store any data they place on the file system. See How do I ensure my plugin works in a cluster?
Updates to the atlassian-cache API
The Confluence caching infrastructure has been updated to use the Atlassian Cache version 2 API. This API is backwards compatible with the previous version (0.1) of the Atlassian Cache used by Confluence.
Plugin developers can create a cache specifically configured to their plugin requirements. See How do I cache data in a plugin?
Confluence clustered now uses Hazelcast
Coherence has been replaced by Hazelcast for clustered installations. As a result of this change the Confluence distributed cache model will change. Hazelcast supports a caching model where the data is evenly partitioned across all the nodes in a cluster, instead of being fully replicated on each node. This should afford much better scalability of the cluster.
New REST API
We are in the process of developing a new REST API for Confluence. Our existing APIs will be deprecated over time, as equivalent resources become available in the REST API. We recommend plugin developers use the REST API where possible.
See Confluence API for more details.
More granular control of the Page Properties and Page Properties Report macros
We have added an optional Page Properties ID parameter to both the Page Properties and Page Properties Report macros. Specify a matching ID in each macro to report on a specific Page Properties macro on a page that contains multiple Page Properties macros.
Minor changes to the Administration Console and cog menu
We have made a small change to the Confluence Administration console to move some settings from the General Configuration page to a new Further Configuration page. The functionality of these items have not changed.
The Cog menu has also changed. To access Confluence Admin choose 
> General Configuration. This will take you straight to the General Configuration page in the Confluence Administration console. If you want to administer users or add-ons there are now options in the cog menu to take you directly to those pages, no need to go to Confluence Admin first.
More feature improvements
- Users can now move individual blog posts between spaces.
- Administrators can disable individual space blueprints across an entire Confluence site.
- New parameters for the attachments macro - you can choose to show or hide previews and CreatedDate is now available as a sort option.
- @mentions autocomplete now recognizes full name, user name or part of a name.
- Ability to insert markdown into a Confluence page. Go to Insert > Markup and choose Markdown. Confluence will convert your content to Confluence editor format (this is a one way process)
- Improvements to the JIRA Issues macro including:
- JIRA status lozenges
- improved PDF export
- sort column headings
- ability to create issues in projects that contain required fields. System fields and some custom field types (plain text field types only) are supported.
- ability to display a single issue as a table, with customizable column headings
New EAP Documentation
Full documentation for this EAP release can be found in the new Confluence EAP documentation space. This space will be updated with the latest documentation shortly after the release of a milestone or beta.
Giving feedback
We'd love your feedback so please:
- Feel free to comment on this page with your feedback, or
- Send us your comments via the 'Got Feedback' option in the header of your EAP Confluence site.
Upgrade notes
For standalone Confluence installations follow the usual upgrade instructions to upgrade your test site to this release.
For clustered installations the following extra steps apply.
Follow the normal upgrade procedure, but execute the following steps immediately after shutting down the existing cluster:
- Create a directory that is visible to all cluster nodes in the same path.
- Shut down the cluster.
Edit
confluence.cfg.xmlin the home directory of each node and add a new property calledconfluence.cluster.homewith the path of the shared directory as the value. Example:<property name="confluence.cluster.home">/mnt/confluence-shared-home</property>- Move all the files/directories from a home directory on one node to the new shared home directory except for the following:
- config
- confluence.cfg.xml
- index
- temp
- bundled-plugins
- plugin-cache-*
- plugins-cache
- plugins-osgi-cache
- plugins-temp
- Remove the moved files/directories from the home directories on all other nodes.
- Continue to follow the normal upgrade procedure.