Atlassian is proud to present Confluence 1.2, otherwise known as Swan, to the world. Existing customers who wish to upgrade, 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

Swan is the second major update to Confluence, and once again all existing customers can upgrade for free, thanks to the provision for one year of free upgrades in your license. You will find that Swan contains significant new features in the areas of user management, search and space browsing, as well as the usual raft of enhancements, bug fixes and things we just couldn't resist throwing in at the last minute.

In all, 109 issues were resolved between 1.1.2 and 1.2. You can see the full list here: Issues Resolved for 1.2

Looking towards the future, we are going to attempt to increase the frequency of releases. While having one release every three months makes for impressively long release notes, it also means that customers are often left waiting longer than might be necessary for important enhancements or bug-fixes.

Upgrading from 1.1.2

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!

You will need to reindex your site after upgrading to enable some of the new site search features. You can do this from the "Rebuild Search Index" link on the Administration Console.

Site administrators upgrading from 1.1.2 or earlier should take particular note of the changes to global and space permissions. Confluence should automatically upgrade old permissions to the new scheme when upgrading from or importing data from earlier versions, but it is a good idea to check that your spaces are still secure and accessible after the upgrade, just in case.

Upgrading from 1.0.3a

Users upgrading directly from 1.0.3a should also read the Nymboida Release Notes for caveats regarding the 1.0 -> 1.1 upgrade.

Contents

1. New Features
2. Improvements
3. Notable Bug-fixes

See also: Issues Resolved for 1.1

New Features

Page List Views

The old "list pages" screen has been enhanced, almost to the point of being unrecognizeable. In its place, we now offer three ways to browse the contents of a space.

The Alphabetical View looks like the "list pages" screen from 1.1 and earlier, but it has been enhanced to allow you to find pages quickly by the first letter of their title.

The Directory View presents the contents of a space as a tree, allowing you to drill down the hierarchy of parent and child pages (You will need Javascript turned on to use this view).

The Search View presents Swan's enhanced search interface, already focused on the space you are looking at.

Image Thumbnails and Thumbnail Galleries

You can now display a thumbnail of any image attached to a page. Clicking on the thumbnail will pop up a window containing the full-sized image. For example, the nice picture of the waterfall from my holiday in California was generated by the following wiki-markup.

!waterfall.jpg|align=right thumbnail!

In addition, the {gallery} macro will create a thumbnail gallery of all the images that are attached to the page the macro is included in. 

The maximum sizes for thumbnails are configured in the General Configuration section of the Administrative Console.

Threaded Comments

Bowing to public demand, we have added the ability to arrange comments by thread: users may respond to a particular comment, and the comments will be arranged in accordance with who responded to what.

The default is still for comments to be presented as a flat list, but you can enable comment-threading in the General Configuration section of the Administrative Console.

Improvements

Enhanced Search

The site-search functionality of Confluence has been enhanced, both subtly behind the scenes, and quite obviously in front of them.

Behind the scenes, we now index more information such as attachment comments and filenames. We have improved the indexing of Powerpoint presentations so that more text is extracted from the Powerpoint file. We have also tweaked the ranking algorithms behind the search so that you are more likely to find the page (space, comment, blog post, attachment, user...) you are looking for.

More obviously, we have given the user a lot more control over searching with an intuitive user interface that allows you to limit searches by space, type of content, or date last modified, and to group search results by type and space.

The {search} macro has also been updated to take advantage of the new search features (the options are described more fully in the notation guide linked from Confluence's edit page):

{search:query=Confluence|maxLimit=5|spacekey=DISC|type=page}

New Permissions Interface

Two of the biggest issues users have been having with permissions in Confluence were:

• The interface for setting permissions was confusing.
• It was hard to keep sites that allowed anonymous access below the workgroup license 25-user limit, especially if they used external user management.

Both of these issues have been fixed in Swan, but it has involved a slight change in the way permissions are checked. This should not be a problem for new Confluence users: the new system is easier to use than the old,. However, if you are upgrading from 1.1.2 or earlier, you should read this document to see what's different.

And a whole lot more...

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

• The "double-click to edit" feature has been removed.
• Blog views now come with a monthly calendar showing nearby posts
• Macro libraries can now include images, or any other content the macro needs to serve over the web: look out for new example code in the macro documentation soon.
• Users can set their profile page to be their site homepage
• You can delete all referrer links that match your exclusion list (in General Configuration), to rid the site of referrer spam
• The site's administrative, search and editing pages are served with robots exclusion meta tags so that only the site's main content will be indexed by well-behaved search engines
• Restoring backups should be significantly faster for installations with many users
• Administrators can choose to restore backups from the filesystem instead of uploading them (important if your backup is quite large)
• Confluence now serves files with a proper Content-Length header, so browsers can display the download accurately
• CSS stylesheets are hidden in emails so they don't mess up Lotus Notes
• Export and backup filenames use a neater yyyymmdd date format

Notable Bug-fixes

• Exports created on Windows can now be imported on Unix-like operating systems without having to fix the path separators
• Hyphens in page headings or anchors will no longer render strangely
• Restoring a backup during setup now properly generates the search indexes
• Page "short links" now respect the configured site URL, regardless of which URL the user is accessing the site from
• Strange Powerpoint files no longer choke the indexer
• Users with Admin privileges can now see the link to the Administration Console without being in the 'confluence-administrators' superuser group
• Space administrators can modify space templates without having global administrator privileges.
• User macros are now lower-cased by default
• It is now possible to change the case of a page title by renaming the page