Confluence 1.0rc1

It's Friday again, and that means it's time for us to release Murray; Confluence 1.0 Release Candidate 1.

RC1 marks the start of the feature-freeze as we plunge headfirst towards a stable 1.0 release. From now until 1.0-final we will be concentrating on fixing up the remaining bugs and polishing the interface. We are hoping that we won't need to send out a second release candidate, but we can't really make any promises until we've had a chance to go through the inevitable deluge of new issues that will follow this release.

Of course, this means that there are features you want to see in Confluence that won't make it into 1.0-final. [Keep those ideas and suggestions coming|DISC:]. Confluence isn't going to stop at 1.0 -- we just had to draw a line _somewhere_ or we'd end up perpetually in beta. We have no plans to slow down development after the first major release. Your Confluence license includes a year of upgrades, and if you think Confluence is way cool now, it's just going to get better.

As always, before upgrading an existing Confluence installation, be sure to back up your data.

As you can see below, we've been busy the last two weeks. A hard-earned thirst needs a good cold beer.

Contents

1. New Features
2. New Macros
3. Improvements
4. Notable Bug Fixes
5. Outstanding Issues
6. Database Changes from Beta

See also: Issues Resolved for 1.0rc1

New Features

Remote API

!http://blogs.atlassian.com/rebelutionary/images/screenshots/conf-cocoa-client-shot-thumb.gif|align=right!

Confluence can now be browsed and edited remotely via SOAP or XML-RPC. [There are more details of the XML-RPC API here|http://developer.atlassian.com/display/CONFDEV/Confluence XML-RPC and SOAP APIs], while the SOAP WSDL can be downloaded from {{$your_confluence_root$/rpc/soap/confluenceservice-v1.wsdl}}. Throwing together a GUI client for Confluence is now [pretty|http://blogs.atlassian.com/rebelutionary/archives/000385.html] [easy|http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/2004/02/05/a_confluence_gui_client_in_200_lines_of_code], so feel free to embed Confluence support into your favorite editor, web browser or IDE.

Blogging Enhancements

The sketchy blogging support from Beta4 has been upgraded and overhauled. Enhancements include:

•  The look and feel of blog pages has been greatly improved.
• A "recent blog posts" list available from the Space Summary page.
• Daily and monthly views for blog posts. 
• Blog posts can now be edited and deleted. 
• You can now link to blog posts using the internal link syntax. Blog posts are addressed by their posting-date and title, like so: SPACEKEY:/2004/01/03/Blog Post Title\.
• You can link to the daily views, too: [SPACEKEY:/2004/01/03/\.
• RSS feeds are available for new blog posts, both globally (from the dashboard), and for each space (from the space summary page).

Also, anonymous users are no longer allowed to post blog entries. We couldn't really think of a use-case where anonymous blog-posts would be wanted, but if you can, let us know!

Configurable User Notification

With any knowledge-sharing application, it's important to keep informed as to what has changed. One way to do this is by subscribing to any of the RSS feeds offered by Confluence. Another is to have Confluence email you directly whenever there has been a change. Up 'til now, users have had to make do with the ad-hoc regular-expression based notifications that were put in for developers. WIth RC1, we now have a more fine-grained and user-friendly way to choose how you find out about changes to the site.

# Each day, Confluence can email you a summary of any changes that have been made to the site in the past 24 hours. You can activate this feature in your user preferences.
# You can subscribe to "watch" a page from the option in the right-hand operations menu. Whenever the page is modified, commented on, or a new attachment is added, you will receive an email. When you no longer want to watch the page, you can click the icon again to unsubscribe.
# You can subscribe to watch an entire space from the option on the space summary page. This subscribes you to all pages in that space, and also notifies you when new pages are created.

Each user can now also choose whether or not they will be notified of changes they make themselves.

Trackbacks

While Confluence has always tracked links between pages within the Confluence site, it now has a way to track links to and from external sites: the Trackback API. In this way, a Confluence page can be informed when another site has mentioned it, and inform other sites that it has linked to them.

We have implemented the [Trackback|http://www.movabletype.org/docs/mttrackback.html] and [Trackback auto-discovery|http://www.movabletype.org/docs/mttrackback.html#autodiscovery%20of%20trackback%20ping%20urls] APIs across pages and blog-posts. Trackback is a widely implemented API that allows web pages to notify each other of links. You can enable (or disable) trackbacks from the Confluence general administration page.

When Trackbacks are enabled, each Page and Blog Post within Confluence is set up to receive trackback pings, and contains the auto-discovery code to allow clients to automatically find out how to send those pings. Trackbacks that are received are listed in the right-hand sidebar of the page.

Also when Trackbacks are enabled, Confluence will perform auto-discovery on each outgoing link from a page to see if the destination is equipped to receive trackbacks, and send its own trackback ping.

Look forward to future versions of Confluence making _very_ interesting use of this feature. :)

Per-Space Look and Feel

The template-- and color-scheme editing features that were available on a global basis in previous versions of Confluence can now be configured separately for each space, allowing you to apply a different look and feel to the various spaces within your Confluence site.

New Macros

• Panel Macro allows you to draw a shaded box containing some content.

Improvements

• Import and Export should now be much faster, and use significantly less memory. 
• The user browser now has a search function, to make it possible to manage large numbers of users effectively. 
• Incoming links are no longer displayed on a page if the user is unable to view the page being linked from. 
• The \{anchor\}, \{blog-posts\}, \{index\} and \{quote\} macros are now documented properly. 
• You can escape smileys by putting a backslash before their last character, to cause them not to be rendered as images :\).
• You can now link to peoples' user profile pages with \[~username\] (e.g. [~cmiller]).
• You can now link to space homepages with \[SPACEKEY:\] (e.g. [TEST:]).
• mailto: links have a nifty icon: mailto:user@example.com.
• The History popup now tracks your visits to blog posts, space summaries and user profile pages.
• Recent changes listings on the dashboard, user profile and space summary pages now includes changes to all content, not just pages.
• New Emoticons! (well, icons really)

| (y\) | (n\) | (i\) | (/\) | (x\) | (!\) |
| (y) | (n) | (i) | (/) | (x) | (!) |

Notable Bug-fixes

• Added HTML headers to detect and prevent RSS, HTML-Include and FatCow macros from being made to loop in on themselves. [CONF-525@JIRA]
• The \{anchor\} macro, and \[DOCPRIV:null] links now work as advertised. [CONF-616@JIRA], [CONF-605@JIRA]
• Fixed a divide-by-zero error in page diffs. [CONF-584@JIRA]
• Included {{javax.transaction}} libraries with release, to allow the WAR to run under Tomcat 5 [CONF-613@JIRA]. 
• And many more rendering and stability fixes...

Outstanding Issues

•  Still some problems with character encoding in page titles. [CONF-569@JIRA]
•  HTML include macro interacts badly with other Radeox filters. [CONF-549@JIRA]

Database Changes from Beta4

New Tables

TRACKBACK and NOTIFICATION tables were introduced. These tables should be generated automatically when you first start RC1.

New column in the EXTRNLINKS table

•  alter table EXTRNLINKS add column CONTENTTYPE varchar(255);
• Constraint Change on LINKS Table*

The "not null" constraint was removed from the DESTPAGETITLE column of the LINKS table. Consult your database documentation on how to alter your database for this change. For example:

•  _MySQL 3.23:_ alter table LINKS modify DESTPAGETITLE VARCHAR(255);
•  _PostgreSQL 7.3.2_ alter table LINKS alter DESTPAGETITLE drop not null;