Confluence 6.0.0-m EAP 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.
Issues with this milestone?
Please raise an issue to tell us about it.
Introducing collaborative editing modes
To help you keep your team working together, we've introduced three collaborative editing modes than can be enabled in your Confluence instance.
- On - use this mode to bring collaborative editing goodness to your teams. Collaborative editing is on by default when you install or upgrade Confluence.
- Limited - use this mode if you need to troubleshoot Synchrony problems. As the name suggests, editing functionality is limited, but your team's shared drafts are protected. When your site is in limited mode, only one person can edit a shared draft at one time, you can't revert to an earlier version of the page in the page history, you can't move pages and you can't make inline comments on pages.
- Off - use this mode if you decide that collaborative editing is not right for your site (for example, you have strict auditing requirements that the collaborative editing experience can't meet yet). In this mode, your team can only edit their own personal draft of a page. Confluence will attempt to merge any conflicts on save (similar to the Confluence 5 editing experience). Any existing shared drafts are lost when you change the editing mode to off.
Turning collaborative editing off can have a significant impact on your site, especially if your users have unpublished work in progress, so limited mode is the way to go when you're troubleshooting.
Monitor and restart Synchrony
You can now check your current Synchrony status and restart the service from within Confluence.
Head to Administration menu 
, then General Configuration. > Collaborative editing.
The documentation theme has been removed
If you upgrade your test site to 6.0.0-m77 the documentation theme will be removed. We'll automatically turn on the default theme for any spaces that currently use the documentation theme.
If you've customized the documentation theme (by adding wiki markup to the sidebar, header or footer) we'll take this wiki markup and drop it into the sidebar, header and footer in the default theme. Your space sidebar will look a little different after the upgrade but in most cases the changes shouldn't be dramatic.
See our documentation theme migration FAQ for answers to all your questions about this change.
Proxy support
You can now use collaborative editing when running Confluence with a reverse proxy.
See How to use NGINX to proxy requests for Confluence for an example of how to set this up with NGINX or Running Confluence behind NGINX with SSL for an example with SSL.
More library upgrades
This milestone contains upgrades to Hibernate 5, Atlassian gzipfilter 3.0, and Google gson 2.7.
This milestone contains fixes and other improvements.
Spoiler alert! In the next milestone we expect to be able to share a new admin screen that will allow you to:
- turn collaborative editing on or off (or switch to limited mode for troubleshooting)
- monitor and restart Synchrony.
Guava upgrade
In this milestone we've upgraded Guava to 18.0. This is a significant upgrade with a number of breaking changes.
See Preparing for Confluence 6.0 for more information.
Collaborative editing
We've made some changes to how you exit the editor when you're in a shared draft.
There are also a number of bug fixes and other improvements in this milestone.
Delete page hierarchies
When deleting a page you now have the option to delete just the current page, or to delete the page and all its child pages. It's perfect for cleaning up old content or for quickly disposing of all those copies you can now make.
This is an early milestone, so we're still working on a few known issues:
- The count of the number of pages in the hierarchy can be wrong sometimes if there are drafts in the hierarchy.
- The count of incoming links in the preview can be wrong if there are certain restrictions in the hierarchy.
- After delete finishes, the user is not redirected off the deleted page.
- If there are edit-restricted pages in the hierarchy, their children do not get deleted.
Collaborative editing
It's time to test drive the feature you've all been waiting for - collaborative editing. See who's editing the page with you, and see their changes in real time. Changes are automatically saved and synced so there's no need to ever manually save. Your only decision is when to publish the changes.
Not ready to publish yet? Hit the X at the top-right of the editor to close the editor. The draft remains available for you and others to continue editing until you're ready to publish (but more about drafts later).
Read more about collaborative editing and changes to drafts here: Collaborative editing.
A word of warning - this feature is still in development. It's provided so add-on developers can begin to test their add-ons. We know you're excited, but do not install this release in production (no matter how much you want collaborative editing right now) as you will not be able to roll back if things go wrong.
Collaborative editing is not yet available for Confluence Data Center. Don't worry, we'll make this available in a future milestone.
It is not currently possible to see exactly who made each change before publishing, discarding changes, or after a page has been published. The page history lists published versions but changes are attributed to the person that published the page, rather than the person who made each specific change. We're continuing to work on this area, so stay tuned.
For administrators
The engine that powers collaborative editing is called Synchrony. When you install Confluence, Synchrony will be configured to run as a separate service on your server.
For add-on developers
Read more about how Collaborative editing for Confluence Server works under the hood, and find out how you can make sure your add-on is compatible.
Introducing shared drafts
Collaborative editing introduces a new type of draft, a shared draft. Previously when you edited a page but didn't save it, Confluence would create a draft that was only visible to you (a personal draft). Now, Confluence creates a shared draft whenever anyone edits a page. All page editors work on this same shared draft, and it exists until someone publishes the page.
When you publish a shared draft, you're publishing all the changes you have made and changes made by others. Publishing creates a version in the page history.
If you discard a shared draft, you're discarding all changes, including changes made by others. Because shared drafts aren't versioned, there's no way to get a discarded draft back.
Accessing your personal drafts
Your personal drafts are still available, but are no longer editable. If you edit a page, you'll see the shared draft of the page, not your personal draft (if one exists).
If you need to get content out of your previous personal drafts head to Profile > Drafts, locate your page and copy the contents.
Copy page hierarchies
By popular demand, you can now copy a page and all its child pages in one easy process. Use it to duplicate existing content, kick off new projects with the perfect pro-forma page hierarchy, or take a snapshot of important pages - the possibilities are endless.
But that's not all, you can now also choose a location to copy to. No more copying a page and then manually moving it to another parent page or space.
No matter whether you copy into the same space or a different space - we give you the tools you need to modify page titles on the fly and control what's included in your new pages.
Infrastructure changes
Head to Preparing for Confluence 6.0 to find out about changes that will impact plugin developers.
We will not be providing 32-bit installers for Confluence 6.0. If this will impact you, please let us know CONF-42817 - Getting issue details... STATUS .
Supported platform changes
In Confluence 6.0, we've ended support for:
- Internet Explorer 10
- MySQL 5.5