Release Notes 1.0b4
Confluence 1.0b4
To belatedly ring in the Year of the Code-Monkey, it's time for Confluence 1.0 beta 4. We've had some great feedback on the last few betas, thanks to everyone for submitting bugs, and contributing to Atlassian Answers and the discussion space.
Contents
See also: Issues Resolved for 1.0b4
Atlassian FatCow
Along with 1.0b4, we're also releasing FatCow: Functional Acceptance Testing for the Confluence Wiki. Styled after Ward Cunningham's FIT and Bob Martin's Fitnesse, FatCow allows you to define web-based acceptance tests in wiki notation, and then run them from inside Confluence. Here's a tutorial showing how to write a quick FatCow test suite that makes sure Confluence shows up on Google. 
FatCow is Open Source, and also serves as example code for anyone who wants to extend Confluence by writing their own macros (something that we'll be looking to make easier in future releases).
New Features
Blog Posts
Each space can now host a "blog" of pages that are organized by date, rather than just by title. This is pretty useful if you want to attach some kind of updating news to a space. The "create blog post" button can be found on the right-hand toolbar.
Blogging support is pretty basic right now: you can create posts, and you can include the most recent posts in a page using the {blog-posts} macro. Rest assured, we'll be piling on the features in the next few releases.
Move Pages Between Spaces
A much requested feature, our newest refactoring lets you move pages cleanly from one space to another. We're using this already to maintain a private space where we stage documentation waiting to be transferred to the main documentation space.
Configurable Site Description
You can now change the text in the site description that appears on the user's dashboard: somewhere to put welcome messages or MOTDs. And, of course, it understands Confluence markup.
#includePage("Page") Velocimacro
For the decorator-editors, you can use this render the contents of a page anywhere inside a decorator. The page has to be in the space that the user is looking at, and if the page does not exist, nothing will be rendered.
New Macros
- {blog-posts} displays the most recent blog posts for a space.
- {rss} macro now has maxEntries and titleBar parameters.
- {anchor} macro allows you to create named anchors in a page (link to them with [SPACE:page#anchor])
Improvements
- You can now draw en – and em — dashes.
- mailto: links are now drawn as just the email address, like so user@example.com
- the {search} macro now excludes the page it was included in from the search results
- you can also link to attachments using #-anchors [SPACE:page#attachment.pdf]
- you are given the opportunity to pick a template when creating a page from a link, and any entered page title survives picking a page template
Notable Bug-fixes
- Spurious error message about editing a stale version of a page have been squashed.
- No longer crashes when you add a user to certain groups.
- Some database queries have been rewritten to work around the fact that MySQL doesn't understand sub-selects.
- Diffs more reliably highlight changed words
- Several minor rendering problems to do with deeply nested lists have been fixed.