Below are some important notes on upgrading to Confluence 5.9. For details of the new features and improvements in this release, see the Confluence 5.9 Release Notes.

Note on version numbers: The first publicly available release for 5.9 is Confluence 5.9.1. Confluence 5.9.0 was an internal release. 

Upgrade notes

Infrastructure changes

There are some significant upgrades to infrastructure in Confluence 5.9, like the move to Atlassian plugins 4 and Soy 3. See the Confluence 5.9 Upgrade Notes page for more information.

Before upgrading, check that any marketplace add-ons are supported for use with Confluence 5.9.

Dashboard changes

This release features a brand new dashboard that makes it easier to discover what's happening in your site and resume your unfinished work.

If you've customized the global layout for the dashboard, your customizations may look very different in the new dashboard. 

• The Network tabs have been removed completely from the dashboard.
• You can no longer hide the Popular feed by disabling a module in the Dashboard Macros system add-on.
• The Getting Started tips, that appear for administrators, are gone (dashboard-get-started in the global layout).
• Web items added to system.dashboard.button will still appear at the top right, but will appear without an icon, and may be collapsed into an ellipsis menu, depending on the number of items.
• Web panels added to atl.dashboard.left will now appear on the right hand side, under the site welcome message. This location has been deprecated and will be removed in a future release, so if you choose to continue to add content to the dashboard layout, you should use atl.dashboard.secondary instead.

Favorite spaces is now My spaces

We've renamed the existing Favorite spaces feature to My spaces, and dropped it on the new dashboard sidebar where it's super easy to get to. This is just a name change, the behavior of this feature hasn't changed. You may still see Favorite spaces listed here and there, for example in some macro parameters, but don't worry, they're one and the same. 

Changes to What's New

We've removed the What's New dialog (which popped up the first time you logged in to Confluence after upgrading).  What's new will still appear under the Help menu, but will now point to our release notes. This is no longer customizable, but you can still choose to hide What's new from the help menu by disabling the Confluence What's New system add-on.

Disk space for indexes in Confluence Data Center

Version 5.9 of Confluence Data Center writes search index snapshots to the shared home directory, to make it easier to implement a data replication strategy for disaster recovery. Because of these index snapshots, you'll need roughly twice as much space for your indexes.

Upgraded C3P0 to version 0.9.5.1

In Confluence 5.9 we've upgraded C3P0 from version 0.9.1.2 to 0.9.5.1.

Discontinued or deprecated features

Status updates

In our quest to simplify your Confluence experience, we have removed 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 before upgrading. After the upgrade these macros will show as 'unknown macro'.

macroName:status-list

View File macros

In Confluence 5.7 we introduced a fantastic new files experience, which allows you to upload, embed, preview and comment on Office and PDF documents.

As part of our work to improve performance and make Confluence easier to use, we have decided to officially deprecate the older View File macros (Office Word, Office PowerPoint, Office Excel, and PDF).  The macros are still available in Confluence 5.9, but we do plan to remove them in a future release. 

See the announcement for more information.

Documentation theme

As previously announced, we plan to remove the documentation theme in Confluence 6.0. 

We know that many of you use the documentation theme because you like to have a page tree in the sidebar. This has been available in the default theme for several releases, plus other great features like sidebar shortcuts, JIRA links, and sticky table headers. 

There are some documentation theme features that we know you'll miss, so in this release we've included the ability to add:

• a header and footer
• custom content to the sidebar.

These fields continue to use wiki markup, so you'll be able to drop your existing wiki markup straight from the documentation theme into the default theme.

You don't need to do anything right now, but we strongly encourage you to give the default theme a try in your spaces.  To help you switch themes we've put together a step-by-step guide which covers everything from how to turn on the default theme, how to find out which spaces are using the theme, and what to do if the Documentation theme is the global theme for your whole site. 

End of support announcements

• End of support for Internet Explorer 9 
  As previously announced, from this release onward we no longer support Internet Explorer 9 
• End of support for Oracle 11.1 and 11.2
  As previously announced, from this release onward we no longer support Oracle 11.1 and 11.2

• End of support for Microsoft SQL 2008
  As previously announced, from this release onward we no longer support Microsoft SQL 2008

Take a look at the End of Support Announcements for Confluence for more information, and check out the Supported Platforms for Confluence 5.9.

Upgrade procedure

Note: Upgrade to a test environment first. Test your upgrades in your test environment before rolling them into production.

If you're already running a version of Confluence, please follow these instructions to upgrade to the latest version:

1. Go to  > General Configuration > Support Tools > Health Check to check your license validity, application server, database setup and more
2. Before you upgrade, we strongly recommend that you back up your installation directory, home directory and database
3. If your version of Confluence is earlier than 5.8, read the release notes and upgrade guides for all releases between your version and the latest version
4. Download the latest version of Confluence
5. Follow the instructions in the Upgrade Guide

Known issues

• It's not possible to insert a new canvas board macro. See  CONF-40011 - Getting issue details... STATUS . If you use this third-party add-on, we recommend you wait until this issue's resolved before upgrading to Confluence 5.9.

• Performance issues have been reported with Crowd 2.7.x and Confluence 5.9. If you manage users in Crowd, we recommend upgrading to the latest version. 

Checking for known issues and troubleshooting the Confluence upgrade

After you have completed the steps required to upgrade your Confluence installation, check all the items on the Confluence post-upgrade checklist to ensure that everything works as expected. If something is not working correctly, please check for known Confluence issues and try troubleshooting your upgrade as described below:

• Check for known issues. Sometimes we find out about a problem with the latest version of Confluence after we have released the software. In such cases we publish information about the known issues in the Confluence Knowledge Base.
• Check for answers from the community. Other users may have encountered the same issue. You can check for answers from the community at Atlassian Community.
• Did you encounter a problem during the Confluence upgrade? Please refer to the guide to troubleshooting upgrades in the Confluence Knowledge Base.

• If you encounter a problem during the upgrade and can't solve it, please create a support ticket and one of our support engineers will help you.