Release Notes 1.4

Atlassian Software is proud to present Confluence 1.4 (otherwise known as Hunter). 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

Hunter is the fourth major update to Confluence, and the biggest yet in terms of new features and improvements both visible to the user or hidden "under the hood". Between 1.3.5 and 1.4, we resolved a massive 480 issues.

A big thanks to everyone who reported bugs, and offered suggestions over the last few months, especially everyone who helped by trying out our Confluence Development Releases.

See also: Issues Resolved for 1.4

Contents

Upgrading From a Previous Version of Confluence

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

Upgrading from 1.3.5

Because of the significant UI changes between 1.3 and 1.4 (see below), we highly recommend disabling any themes or UI customizations before upgrading Confluence.

After upgrading to 1.4, administrators will need to rebuild the site's search-index to ensure all the new search features are enabled. Do this from the Content Indexing section of the global administration menu.

Upgrade Migration

The database migration tasks that must be run to upgrade Confluence from 1.3 to 1.4 may take several minutes to run. During this time, Confluence will be unavailable.

Confluence License Expiration

A commercial Confluence license entitles you to a year of free upgrades. As such, Confluence 1.4 is the first release of Confluence to which some customers may not be able to upgrade.

If you were issued your Confluence license before May 24th 2004, you will not be able to upgrade to Confluence 1.4. Confluence 1.4 will refuse to run with any license issued before this date, and you will be required to downgrade to a previous Confluence version.

Upgrading from 1.2.3 or Earlier

Users upgrading from an earlier version of Confluence should check the release-notes of the other major Confluence releases:

Migration

The best place to find out about the new features available in Confluence 1.4 is by checking out our What's New in Confluence 1.4 pages. However, there are a few features of specific interest to Confluence administrators that will be mentioned here:

v2Renderer

The engine by which Confluence converts wiki-text to HTML has been rewritten from scratch for Confluence 1.4. This was necessary, as the complexity of Confluence's markup was overwhelming the capabilities of the previous engine and leading to an increasing number of bugs, some of which had the potential to bring down the entire server.

v2Renderer is in every way more powerful (and better, more predictable) than the previous engine, and has undergone a lot of testing to make sure that it renders wiki pages the same way as its predecessor. However, pages that made use of bugs or undocumented features in the original engine may no longer render the same in 1.4 as they did in 1.3. If you come across something that is a bug or a missing feature in the new renderer, please file an issue in JIRA.

One side-effect of the new renderer is that custom Java macros written for Confluence 1.3 and earlier may not be compatible with Confluence 1.4 (although most should continue to function). 

New User Interface

In response to a lot of feedback from customers and users of Confluence, the User Interface has undergone a major overhaul between Confluence 1.3 and 1.4. While the changes are mostly self-explanatory, and we believe the new interface is significantly easier for everyone to use and understand than its predecessor, it may be a good idea to make the following resource available to your users as part of the transition: 1.4 Interface - Where Did Everything Go?

Because of the substantial changes to the interface, themes and UI customizations made for Confluence 1.3 and earlier are not compatible with Confluence 1.4, and should be disabled before you upgrade.

Blogs have become News

Also in response to a lot of feedback, blogs in Confluence have now been renamed to news. We feel this makes it a lot easier to explain them to new and non-technical Confluence users. None of the functionality of blogs has been changed, just the name. (smile)

New Features

Confluence 1.4 has a lot of cool new stuff. Over the next week we'll be releasing a new section of the Confluence website that will examine the new features in detail. Stay tuned.

Notable Bug Fixes

We resolved a lot of issues between Confluence 1.3.5 and Confluence 1.4. The best way to see what we've fixed is to ask JIRA, the world's best issue-tracker: Issues Resolved for 1.4

Outstanding Bugs

Some bugs were introduced during the Confluence 1.4 development cycle that we could not fix in time for the final release. Of note are:

  • Index rebuilding may fail on multi-processor systems (for a workaround, see CONF-3168)
  • You can not install an XWork plugin by uploading through the web interface, it must be copied into WEB-INF/lib (CONF-3184)
  • Uploading a malformed plugin through the web interface may make other plugins cease to function (CONF-3183)
  • Under certain circumstances, the mbox mail import may fail against Oracle databases (CONF-3284)
  • The Insert Image and Insert Link popups jump the cursor to the top of the text input area on browsers other than Internet Explorer (CONF-3232)

Once again, if you find any bugs in Confluence, or have any feature suggestions, you can report them online in JIRA.

Last modified on Aug 10, 2016

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