Release Notes 1.4-DR4

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Confluence 1.4-DR4

Confluence 1.4-DR4 is the fourth development release in the cycle leading up to Confluence 1.4. In 1.4-DR4 the user interface continues to improve, and our new wiki->HTML renderer lands, fixing a large number of bugs (but probably introducing a few more)

1.4-DR4a

One of the bugs that was introduced in 1.4-DR4 caused the edit option to disappear completely from the Confluence interface for anyone who was not a global administrator. Because that issue rendered Confluence mostly unuseable, 1.4-DR4a has been released including a fix to that problem. 1.4-DR4a also includes the patch for Confluence Security Advisory 2005-02-09.

We would like to remind everyonee who downloads the developer releases that they are not fully stable.

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 1.3 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 1.2.3 or earlier, be sure to read the upgrade instructions in the Confluence 1.3 release notes.

Downloads

All development releases are available from Development Releases on the Atlassian website.

New Features in Confluence 1.4-DR4

User Interface Enhancements

The user interface of Confluence continues to improve. A big thankyou to all the users who contributed feedback on DR3. While the changes between DR3 and DR4 aren't as radical as the last release, we've been able to polish up a lot of the edges, and make Confluence even easier and more pleasant to use.

We're still gathering feedback on the UI changes, add your input here: 1.4 UI Discussion

Mail Archives

  • You can now bulk-delete all mail within a space (mail deleted this way does not go to the trash, and can not be recovered later!)
  • Pagination on the mail archives is a bit more sane: it doesn't try to tell you about every single page of mail in the archives.
  • The mbox importer detects if you're trying to import something that isn't an mbox file, making you much less likely to break anything if you upload the wrong file.

Nofollow Support

As part of the effort to combat spam on wikis and blogs (Confluence being both), Google came up with some markup that will cause search-engines not to follow links. By removing the main benefit of wiki-spamming (increased search-engine PageRank), it's hoped that the noxious practice will stop being cost-effective, and eventually die out.

By default, all URLs inserted in a page (or in comments) will be given the nofollow tag. Inter-page links or shortcut links (i.e. CONF-2622) will not be tagged. If your wiki doesn't support public editing or commenting, or you just disapprove of nofollow on principle, the site administrator can turn the feature off in General Configuration.

V2Renderer

Over the last few releases of Confluence, it has become apparent that the engine we were using to convert wiki text to HTML was starting to cause us problems. There were a growing number of bugs that we simply couldn't fix, because the nature of the engine meant that fixing one bug would cause ten worse bugs to spring up in its place. After a few false starts, we can now introduce 'v2Renderer', which fixes quite a few of these problems already, and promises to make fixing the rest of them much easier:

type key summary assignee reporter priority status resolution created updated due

Unable to locate Jira server for this macro. It may be due to Application Link configuration.

Because this is the first public release of v2Renderer, it's likely that there are some situations in which the markup of pages may change. We've been pretty careful, but users who have been making heavy use of undocumented (or accidental) features of the old markup may encounter situations in which the page displays differently to before. Please, please report these problems to us, so that we can fix the renderer for the final release, or perhaps provide you with a script to painlessly convert your pages to a markup that works.

Renderer Bugs

If you file a bug about the v2Renderer, PLEASE make sure you put it in the Wiki/XHTML component: this makes finding all the relevant bugs so much easier for me. – CharlesA

Macros

There is a new macro API that we will be rolling out for 1.4. However, there's a compatibility layer in place to make sure that most 1.3 macros will continue to function properly. Most macros written for Confluence 1.3 will continue to work in 1.4-DR4. Most of our macros are running without any changes at all, and many of the ones we did migrate were changed over in order to use the capabilities of the new engine to fix bugs.

We suggest that macro authors who are worried about compatibility test their macros with 1.4-DR4 and contact us as soon as possible to discuss how we can improve the compatibility layer before the final release, or help you migrate to the new API.

Known Bugs

The renaming of links when a page is moved or renamed is currently unreliable. This is a side-effect of the change in renderers, and will be fixed before the final version of 1.4 is released.

Last modified on Nov 8, 2016

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