Confluence 5.9.1-pluginsfour019 Release Notes
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
A better way to restrict pages
In this release we've made it easier to restrict who can edit and view your pages in Confluence.
The new padlock icon 
at the top of the page gets you straight into the restrictions dialog (you can still get there using ... > Restrictions, but why click twice?).
There's three options:
- No restrictions - keep the page open to everyone (hint: use this for a quick way to remove existing restrictions).
- Edit restrictions - limit who can edit a page, but keep it open for everyone to view.
- Edit and view restrictions - set exactly who can view, and who can edit. It's is the most flexible option.
Here's how it looks:
The padlock icon at the top changes when a page is restricted 
, or when it's inheriting view restrictions from another page 
. We'll also give you a warning in the restrictions dialog when your page is affected by restrictions on other pages.
One-click create for blank pages
We love our Confluence templates, and think they're really handy, but we also know that many pages start out blank. To save you time when creating blank pages, we're taking the process from 3 steps down to 1 with our new 'quick create' option. Instead of a single create button in the header, you'll now see two options: Create (blank page) and Create from template.
Page templates and other content types are just as easy to access as they were before. Just choose the Create from template 
option in the header.
More control over page excerpts
The Children Display and Content by Label macros both have an option to show a small excerpt of the content of the page in the list. In this release we've made those excerpts much more awesome.
You can now choose between:
- Simple excerpt – This is the current excerpt, that shows a single line of text from the Excerpt macro on each page. If there's no Excerpt macro, this option will show nothing.
- Rich content – This option shows formatted text, images and even some macros. If there's an excerpt macro on the page, it'll use the contents of that macro, or if there's no Excerpt macro it'll use whatever's at the top of the page.
Give it a try – add a Children Display or Content by Label macro to your page, and turn on the rich content excerpt.
Status updates removal
In our quest to simplify your Confluence experience, we're removing the Status Updates feature in Confluence 5.9. This includes the ability to:
- update your status
- see other people's status via their profile or the User Status List macro.
If you think you might be using the User Status List macro on any pages in your site you might want to remove them. After the upgrade these macros will show as 'unknown macro'.
Infrastructure changes
We've made some pretty significant changes that'll impact plugin developers. If you're one of them, check out the preparing for Confluence 5.9 page for more information.
Upgrade notes
Follow the usual upgrade instructions to upgrade your test site to this release.