Preparing for Confluence 8.6
This documentation is intended for Confluence developers who want to ensure that their existing plugins and apps are compatible with Confluence 8.6
Watch this page to find out when a new milestone is available and what’s changed. We will publish formal release notes once we release a beta.
Latest milestones
29 September 2023 | 8.6.0-rc1 |
Issues with this milestone?
Hit the Feedback button on the Confluence EAP header or raise an issue to tell us about it.
On this page:
Planned changes
In this section we'll provide an overview of the changes we intend to make, so you can start thinking how it might impact your app. We'll indicate when a change has been implemented, and in which milestone.
Confluence 8.6 will only be available to Data Center customers. If you have a Server license, check out your options for upgrading.
Selenium 3 upgrade
Status: DONE
Confluence 8.6 will include an upgrade from Selenium 2.x to Selenium 3.x.
If your app has tests that use the version of Selenium currently provided by Confluence then it's possible some of your tests may break when you update your app to use Confluence 8.6.
We've provided an additional and optional test module that uses Selenium 3 for you to test your apps ahead of time.
For instructions on how to use this module, refer to the Selenium 3 upgrade guide.
Struts 6.3 upgrade
Status: DONE
Confluence 8.6 will include an upgrade to the MVC framework from Struts 2.5 to Struts 6.3. If your plugin targets an earlier version of Confluence, we recommend using the confluence-compat-lib to call ActionContext and ServletActionContext methods. We recently released version 1.6.0 which added support for Struts 6.3. This library now provides transparent compatibility for all supported Confluence versions. More details on how to use this library can be found in this upgrade guide.
We’ve additionally implemented the following stricter security measures:
Proxied objects cannot be accessed from OGNL expressions
Static fields cannot be accessed from OGNL expressions
OGNL expressions are limited to 150 characters
OGNL expressions cannot contain certain nodes/operations
Actions, action methods, and namespaces are subject to stricter naming requirements
OGNL and Struts objects removed from Velocity context
This change has been backported to Confluence 8.5.4.
AWS Secrets Manager as an encryption option
Status: DONE
We will offer AWS Secrets Manager as a new encryption option for plaintext database password storage, adding to our existing encryption options.
Although this welcome addition won't break your existing configuration, the new SecretStore interface and its store and get methods will replace the Cipher interface, and its respective encrypt and decrypt methods. The Cipher interface and its methods will eventually be retired, and should not be used when setting up new encryption functionality. Read more about the new SecretStore interface on our AWS Secrets Manager page.
End of support for Server licenses
Status: DONE
Confluence 8.6.0 is a Data Center-only release and won't support Server licenses. With the end of support for Atlassian Server products, make sure you have a valid Data Center license before upgrading to Confluence 8.6 or later.
To update your license:
Go to Administration
> General Configuration > License Details
Under Update license, enter your Data Center license key
Select Save
Confluence 8.5.x Long Term Support release will continue to support Server licenses until February 15, 2024. Check out your options for upgrading
Implemented changes
In this section we'll provide details of changes we have implemented, organised by the milestone they are first available in. This will help you decide which milestone to use when testing.
RC 1 – 29 September 2023
Milestone 8.6.0-rc1
Contains:
- Minor bug fixes
Beta 2 – 27 September 2023
Milestone 8.6.0-beta2
Contains:
- Minor bug fixes
Beta 1 – 19 September 2023
Milestone 8.6.0-beta1
Contains:
- Forward slash command for macro suggestions
- Accessibility fixes
- Jira Macro issues count fix
- Minor bug fixes
EAP 2 – 11 September 2023
Milestone 8.6.0-m85
Contains:
- Paste without formatting shortcut
- Accessibility fixes
- Support for PostgreSQL 15
EAP 1 – 5 September 2023
Milestone 8.6.0-m79
Contains:
- Selenium 3.x upgrade
- Struts 6.3 upgrade
- AWS Secrets Manager as an encryption option
- Faster permissions check enabled by default
- Image captions
- Hyperlink shortcut
Looking for updated documentation? Check out the Confluence EAP space for the latest docs.
Did you know we’ve got a new developer community? Head to community.developer.atlassian.com/ to check it out! We’ll be posting in the announcements category if when new EAP releases are available.