Confluence 5.6-m8 EAP Release Notes

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23 July 2014

Atlassian is pleased to announce Confluence 5.6 milestone 8 (m8). This is the first public milestone release of Confluence 5.6.

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.

Downloading Confluence

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

Confluence Data Center

This milestone contains a snapshot of our work on our new clustering solution, Confluence Data Center, and is provided to allow plugin developers time to ensure their plugins are cluster compatible ahead of a public release in Confluence 5.6. 

New in this milestone:

  • Hazelcast upgrade - contains further fixes for memory leaks around caching. 
  • AO and SAL upgrades - adds the ability to upgrade plugins in a cluster without stopping nodes. 

Refer to Preparing for Confluence 5.6 for changes that may affect your plugins and to find out how to mark plugins as cluster compatible on Marketplace. See also Starting a Confluence cluster on a single machine for information on how to set up an environment for testing purposes. 

JIRA Chart improvements

Two new chart types for the JIRA Chart macro:

  • Created vs Resolved chart - a line chart showing the difference between the number of issues created, and the number of issues resolved over a given period of time. 
  • Two Dimensional chart - a matrix style chart showing issue statistics. You can configure the X and Y axis to show issue status, priority, type, assignee and more.  

Task Report sorting improvements

Sorting in the Task Report macro has been improved. There is now a Sort parameter that can be used to set the default sort order of Tasks (by due date, assignee or page title) and you can also sort tasks using the Task Report column headings when viewing a page.  

Natural date picker

You can now insert a date lozenge when typing a date in the editor.  Type dd/mm/yyyy or dd-mm-yyyy to trigger the date picker. 

Change to sidebar for all new spaces

The sidebar now defaults to show the page tree when creating a new space. 

Restrict blog posts

By popular demand, you can now restrict blog posts. Restrict blog posts is perfect if you want to be able to make a blog post available just for a specific group or team. Notifications will be sent at the point a blog post is created - removing restrictions won't trigger a new notification. 

Reducing noisy notifications

Notifications will no longer be sent when a page is moved. 

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 existing clustered installations the following extra steps apply. (These extra steps do not apply if you have previously upgraded to one of the Confluence 5.5 milestones). 

Follow the normal upgrade procedure, but execute the following steps immediately after shutting down the existing cluster:

  1. Create a directory that is visible to all cluster nodes in the same path.
  2. Shut down the cluster.
  3. Edit confluence.cfg.xml in the home directory of each node and add a new property called confluence.cluster.home with the path of the shared directory as the value. Example:

    <property name="confluence.cluster.home">/mnt/confluence-shared-home</property>
  4. Move all the files/directories from a home directory on one node to the new shared home directory except for the following:
    • bundled-plugins
    • config
    • confluence.cfg.xml
    • index
    • logs
    • plugin-cache-*
    • plugins-cache
    • plugins-osgi-cache
    • plugins-temp
    • temp
  5. Remove the moved files/directories from the home directories on all other nodes.
  6. Continue to follow the normal upgrade procedure
Last modified on Jul 23, 2014

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