Release Notes 1.3-DR2
Confluence 1.3-DR2 is the second development release in the cycle leading up to Confluence 1.3. For DR2, we have made space-level permissions a lot more fine-grained, and added a new plugin manager which should open the way to making it easier for people to write extensions to Confluence:
Who should upgrade?
Development releases are snapshots of the ongoing Confluence development process. We make them available for customers who are willing to risk an unpolished release in order to have early access to new features.
If you want to be running the most stable and most reliable version of Confluence, you should stick with the official, numbered releases.
Upgrade Procedure
Upgrading Confluence should be pretty easy. If you are upgrading from Confluence 1.2 or higher, you can find instructions here. We strongly recommend that you backup your confluence.home directory and database before upgrading!
If you are upgrading from Confluence 1.1.2 or earlier, be sure to read the upgrade instructions in the Confluence 1.2 release notes.
Note: Because we have made significant changes to permissions in 1.3-DR2, you should check that your user permissions have been correctly migrated. The upgrade manager should ensure permissions remain consistent between versions, but as with anything related to security, it's best to double-check.
New Features in Confluence 1.3-DR2
New Space-Level Permissions
(CONF-1375, CONF-1764 and their linked issues)
We've been getting a lot of requests for more fine-grained control over who can do what in a space, so as a result, we've added a whole raft of new permissions at the space level:
Object | Permissions |
|---|---|
Page | create/edit, remove, export |
Blog Post | create/edit, remove |
Comment | create, remove |
Attachment | create, remove |
Space | export, administer |
Create space permission is still managed at the global level.
The permissions editing screens have been changed a little, too, taking into consideration the feedback we received from the last DR. All editing functions are now firmly on the edit screen, and we have introduced a user-picker to avoid having to find users in a massive drop-down list.
New Plugin Architecture
Confluence now incorporates the plugin architecture that was written for JIRA 3.0 (which in turn was adapted from Confluence's macro management. Who said code reuse was dead?). Right now, there's not much you can do with it, but plugins pave the way to making Confluence a great deal more flexible and extensible.
New Macro Descriptor Format
Macro libraries are now implemented as plugins, which means that if you have written a macro library, you will need to convert your macro-library.xml files to atlassian-plugin.xml files.
Themes
It is now possible to package a color-scheme and a set of customized decorators into a portable Confluence plugin. Just drop the theme jar into your server's classpath, restart the server and space administrators will be able to select the theme from the space administration console.
DR-2 comes with two very simple themes (look under themes/ in your Confluence directory), but we will have more (and more useful) themes available by the time 1.3.0 is released. In addition, we're hoping that users will continue to share their Confluence modifications in the Confluence Extensions Space, and that themes will help you continue to share neat things you've done with Confluence.
Bugs fixed for 1.3-DR2
All the bug-fixes that were part of the Confluence 1.2.3 release have also been incorporated into 1.3-DR2. In addition, we've fixed a handful of issues specifically for 1.3-DR2, take a look in JIRA for the full list.