Confluence 5.7 Release Notes
28 January 2015
With great pleasure, Atlassian presents Confluence 5.7.
Highlights of Confluence 5.7
More
Read the upgrade notes for important info about this release.
See the full list of issues resolved in this release.
Thank you for your feedback
10 feature and improvement requests fulfilled.
More than 650 votes satisfied.
Files are first class citizens
This release is crammed with great improvements that make working with files a breeze. Whether it's project plans, designs for your next marketing campaign, or just a simple Word document, uploading, previewing, reviewing and versioning files has never been easier.
Let's start at the beginning - there's a brand new Files button on the toolbar. From here you can upload just about any type of file, and insert it into your page. Got multiple files? Save time by uploading and inserting them into your page all at once.
When inserting a file into your page, you can choose to show it as a thumbnail or as a link.
What about viewing files? The powerful new preview means you can view many file types right from your Confluence page, no need to download the file first. For example, easily view PDFs or Word, PowerPoint and Excel documents (without Office installed)! Make your files visible and accessible to your entire team.
The new preview also gives you a stack of tools to manage your files:
- upload a new version of the file, even if it has a different filename
- browse through all files on the page
- download the file
- share the file with your team
- comment anywhere on the file.
Simplify your team's feedback loop
Comments on pages and blog posts are great, but what happens when you need to reference a specific sentence, or a particular part of a file? We've introduced a great feedback loop that makes it simple to comment on pages and files then resolve the feedback once you're done. Spend your time revising and improving, not piecing together comments from various sources.
Give feedback on pages
Highlight some text and click 
to add a comment.
Give feedback on files
If it's an image, PDF or Office document, click to preview, then drag a pin 
to where you want to add your comment. You can comment on any part of the file. Don't forget, it's easy to upload a new version of the file to address any feedback.
We're not just talking about plain-text comments either; you can use many of the features of page comments in inline and file comments, like rich text, @mentions and links. Your team can like or reply to discuss changes on the spot.
No matter whether it's a page or a file, you can resolve the comments to close the feedback loop. Easily view or reopen resolved comments at any time.
Keep your team in the know with HipChat
Is your team already using HipChat to collaborate? We've made it super easy to connect Confluence to HipChat.
Administrators can go to 
> General Configuration > HipChat Integration or space administrators can go to Space Tools > Integration > HipChat (you'll need to be a group admin in HipChat to connect).
Once you're connected, you can then send notifications about space activities, like new pages and blogs, directly to your team's HipChat room in real time.
HipChat is team chat that's built for business. Not using HipChat yet? Sign up today to supercharge your collaboration - its free!
Plan your roadmap visually
Create simple, visual roadmaps – that are great for projects, releases or just planning the year ahead – with the new Roadmap Planner macro.
Lanes differentiate teams, products or stages; markers highlight milestones and important dates; and bars indicate phases of work and provide links to more information.
To create a roadmap, insert the macro, add some lanes, bars and markers, and then drag them to the right location.
Small improvements with a big impact
Smarter profile picture and space logo uploader
We've improved the profile picture and space logo uploaders. You can now resize and reposition your image when you upload it.
If you've chosen one of the built-in Confluence profile pictures, we won't change it, but we're retiring the built-in pictures as we think you can find much better pictures to make your profile pop.
No more accidental cancel
The editor 'Cancel' button will now say 'Close' and, the best part is, it'll save a draft of your page just in case you didn't mean to close the editor.
Reminder: if you want to access your drafts, go to your profile picture at the right of the Confluence header, then choose Drafts.
A new space-saving editor
We’ve overhauled the Confluence editor, giving you more space to bring your ideas to life. Page or blog titles and breadcrumbs now appear below the editor toolbar, and scroll with the page, meaning no wasted space when you’re editing. Just enter your title, then scroll it away to focus on your content.
Because the new-look editor saves so much space, there’s no longer a need for the 'full screen editor' view, so we’ve consigned that to the history books.
Heading order respected when importing from Word
If you use Word documents to create multiple pages in Confluence (based on heading levels in your Word document) you'll be pleased to know that your new pages are now organized in the same order as your document, not in alphabetical order.
Confluence gets a new look
We've made some small look and feel changes in this release. The main things you might notice are:
- The search field is now blue, and more subtle.
- The
menu now looks like this 
- The notifications that let you know when someone has commented on or edited a page you're viewing have a brand new design, and have moved to the top-right of the page.
Confluence Data Center improvements
Confluence data center provides performance at scale, high availability and instant scalability in large Confluence installations. Is Data Center right for your organization? Read more about Confluence Data Center.
New cluster monitoring console
Cluster administrators are going to love our new cluster monitoring tools. See essential information like the node you're currently on, system and heap usage on each node and uptime stats for each node at a glance.
Dig deeper into live activity like web requests, long running tasks and scheduled jobs, see cache usage and runtime info, and view the system information for every node, all without leaving the current node.
Go to 
> General Configuration > Clustering.
Workbox is back
In-application notifications are now cluster safe, which means the workbox 
is now available in Confluence Data Center.
Powerful new Content Search REST API
Fans of the advanced search in JIRA, using the JIRA Query Language (JQL), are going to love this. Confluence Query Language (CQL) is here to provide a powerful new content search REST API. Advanced searching with CQL allows you to use structured queries to search for content in a wide range of fields, using SQL-like syntax.
Use well-known keywords – AND, OR, and NOT – to combine multiple search clauses, and use ORDER BY to determine the sort order of your results.
See our page on Advanced Searching using CQL for more info.
Infrastructure changes and API improvements
Notable administration or infrastructure changes in this release:
- AUI upgrade
This release contains an upgrade to AUI 5.7.20.
Attachments are now ContentEntityObjects
The new files experience includes changes to how attachments are handled. Plugin developers should refer to the information on Preparing for Confluence 5.7 for more information.- File conversion service
Confluence now includes a file conversion service, used to generate previews of non-image files like Office documents. It runs as a separate service in the JVM.
- Indexing and querying of JSON Content Properties
In 5.6 we introduced Content Properties for the REST API, a json key / value store for the REST API. Confluence now includes a mechanism to allow plugin developers to index and query these properties using CQL.
For more changes that will affect plugin developers, please see Preparing for Confluence 5.7.
Credits
Our wonderful customers - we 
you guys!
You play an important role in making Confluence better. Thank you to everyone who participated in interviews with us, made suggestions, voted and reported bugs on our issue tracker !