Nymboida, Nym to his friends, is Confluence 1.1. He wants to be your friend.

Confluence 1.1 is the first major update to Confluence. It's faster, more reliable, and packed with new features. Thanks to our policy of a year's free upgrades, any current Confluence customer will be able to upgrade to 1.1 at no cost.

Current customers, or new users who wish to try out Confluence for 30 days can download either the standalone or WAR distributions from the Atlassian website: http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence

Upgrading from 1.0.3a

Upgrading Confluence should be pretty easy: you can find instructions here. We strongly recommend that you backup your confluence.home directory and database before upgrading!

• Users who have enabled external user-management by customizing their osuser.xml file will need to read this document also.
• Users who have used MySQL or Postgresql with Confluence 1.0 should read this document which explains how to get rid of any extraneous triggers or indexes that might have been created.

Contents

1. New Features
2. New Macros
3. Improvements
4. Notable Bug-fixes
5. Outstanding Issues

See also: Issues Resolved for 1.1

New Features

Macro Management

The biggest Nymboida new feature from an end user point of view is going to be the rewritten macro support.

Management - You can now enable and disable macros from this convenient (and very attractive) console. Macros are now grouped into libraries to make the management and creation of related macros simpler. Libraries can be installed, activated or deactivated as a single entity.

User Macros - We've also had a lot of requests from users for simple formatting macros: people who wanted their code snippets or notes to be formated in a certain way. Confluence 1.1 contains a simple way for administrators to create new macros from within the application without a restart: defining a template that the macro will apply to its arguments or content. User macros are very handy for providing consistent formatting and layouts across your pages.

Custom Macros - Installation of new macro libraries is a breeze: simply drop the library .jar file inside the web application, restart Confluence, and your new macros will appear in the management console. Confluence 1.1 also includes a custom macro toolkit (with Task List example shown below) to help users build their own complex macros easily using Java.

More information:

• Guide to Confluence Macros - a guide to the Macro Management console
• Writing User Macros - how to write User Macros
• Custom Java Macros - obsolete - a guide (and worked example) for writing and distributing your own Java macros for Confluence

Attachments: versioning, comments and WebDAV support

Versioning - The number one feature request for Confluence 1.0 was versioned attachments. You ask, we deliver! Confluence can now have multiple versions of the same file attached to a page. It will keep a history of different versions of attachments, expandable dynamically.

Comments - Each attachment can now be accompanied with a comment describing why it is there, what it's about or the reason for it being attached. This is useful for tracking the differences between attachment versions, as well as for informing users as to why they should be interested in a particular file.

WebDAV - You can configure Confluence to store attachments in an external WebDAV server. This allows companies with an existing WebDAV infrastructure to give users alternative ways of accessing attachments and attaching files to Confluence pages.

Improvements to Page and Space Exports

• Exporting pages and spaces to PDF should be a great deal more reliable now. Whereas in Confluence 1.0, the export was likely to fail if the pages contained questionable markup, we now dynamically clean up each page before we export it.
• You can choose whether or not page comments are exported. Often you want to exclude comments if you want to send out a PDF of a page or publish a space as a website.
• The templates used to publish pages and spaces to HTML can be customized on a global and per-space basis. This makes it easy to publish a static website from the contents of a Confluence space: customize your templates, choose which pages to export, and voila.

Customize Display of Blog Posts

The templates used to display blog posts (both individually and in lists) can be edited either globally, or on a per-space basis, in the same way as the site's main decorators are editable. Also, the interface for editing templates has improved and will continue to do so in future releases.

Page Locking

If you want to prevent another user from editing, deleting or renaming a page, you can now lock it. You may want to do this because certain pages in an otherwise public space (for example, front pages, disclaimers or copyright notices) must remain un-edited, or just because you're working on the page and don't want anyone else to interfere just yet.

Locking a page restricts editing to a single user (yourself), or members of a particular group. Anyone with the space administrative permission can override or delete a lock.

Oracle and Weblogic Support

We have made a concerted attack on the various issues that were making Confluence unreliable on Oracle and Weblogic, and we're pleased to report that both have been running just fine in testing. Most importantly, the bug that was preventing pages being saved to Oracle when they were over 4Kb in length has been fixed.

For details of what precisely was fixed, see:

• The Weblogic support super-issue in JIRA
• The Oracle support super-issue in JIRA

Search Powerpoint and Excel Attachments

Confluence already searches across attached Word, PDF and RTF documents, XML, HTML and any plain text file. This search support has now been expanded in Nymboida to include searching and indexing of all text within Microsoft Powerpoint presentations and Excel spreadsheets.

In addition, the new attachment comments are also searchable.

TinyURL

Every page has a unique, short URL displayed at the top of its Page Information page. This makes it easier to send colleague's the URLs for pages with long titles via email, instant message or IRC.

New and Improved Macros

New

• {excerpt} allows you to mark a portion of the page as its "excerpt". This has no effect on the page itself, but other macros (such as {blog-posts} and {children}) can use the excerpt as a short summary of the content of the page.
• {excerpt-include} includes one page's excerpt in another page.

Improved

• {code} macro supports colored highlighting for several more languages: JavaScript, ActionScript, XML and SQL.
• {code} macro can have its title and border customized in the same way as the {panel} macro
• {blog-posts} takes an optional time parameter to indicate how far back it should look for blog posts. For example, {blog-posts:time=7d} will show all blog-posts within the last seven days
• {blog-posts} takes an optional content parameter to change the way the blog-posts are displayed. content=excerpts displays excerpts instead of the full content of the blog entry (using the {excerpt} macro if available, otherwise extracting the first few hundred characters of the post). content=titles displays the entries as a list of titles.
• {children} takes an optional excerpts=true parameter: if any of the children have an excerpt available, the first line will be displayed in the list.

Improvements

Improvements to the Markup Engine

Many improvements have been made to the Confluence markup parser, fixing niggling inconsistencies, and allowing many more combinations of effects. If you want to produce something like the following, you can:

public static void main(String[] args)
{
     System.out.println("Hello World");
} 

You can also center an image using !image.gif|align=center!

Improvements to Linking

• You can specify a link title (which appears in the mouse-over tooltip) by adding another section to the link: [Link Body Text|Page Name|Link Title]
• [//foo/bar/baz.html] will create a relative URL link to /foo/bar/baz.html on the same server as Confluence is running
• file: URL links work
• UNC-style links: [\\SERVER\share\directory\file.doc] will create a file:// link to the file on an external share

Note: Some web browsers (specifically Mozilla) consider file: URLs to be a security hazard, and do not follow them.

And a whole lot more...

Here's the quick fire version of some of the other improvements we've made in this release:

• You can resize the recent changes lists on the dashboard and space summary pages. This change is persisted in your user preferences.
• UI state (whether comments or attachments are open, size of recent changes lists) persists between sessions for registered users.
• The maximum attachment size can be configured from the General Configuration administration page.
• Going to http://yoursite.example.com/display now brings up a list of spaces instead of an error page.
• The display of the space summary page is significantly faster.
• Newly created users don't show up on the dashboard recent changes list unless they edit their profiles.
• The word "Confluence" has been moved to the end of page titles instead of the beginning, making them easier to distinguish in tabs and bookmarks.
• There are more ways to navigate to the "recent blog posts" page for a space.
• Removing a user is significantly faster.
• Headings in pages are automatically turned into anchors with the same name.
• Creating a space now creates an index page as well as a home-page.

Notable Bug-fixes

It's hard to know where to start. We've fixed a lot of bugs across the whole application. If you want to know what's been fixed, you're probably best off looking for yourself.

Two areas, however, have been improved enough to deserve special mention.

• PDF Export - as mentioned above, we've made the PDF export much, much more reliable than it once was. Where before a page or space may have confused the PDF converter into not working, it should now be able to handle any markup you throw up at it.
• International characters - Many issues related to the use of non-ASCII characters in page titles, links, page contents and RSS feeds have been resolved since Confluence 1.0. Our users in non-English-speaking countries should find Confluence a much more pleasant and seamless experience now than they may have before.