Atlassian Software is proud to present Confluence 2.0 (otherwise known as Yarra). Yarra is the result of five months of solid work by the Confluence team, and we're really glad to be able, finally, to share it with the world. Existing customers who wish to upgrade, or new users who wish to try out Confluence for 30 days, can download Confluence from the Atlassian website: http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence

Yarra is the fifth major update to Confluence. Among the improvements in Confluence 2.0 are an easy-to-use WYSIWYG editor for writing pages, labels for categorizing them, and a powerful RSS builder for keeping track of what's new.

Confluence 2.0 is a free upgrade for any customer who purchased their Confluence license after November 16th, 2004. If the maintenance period of your license has expired, or is about to expire, why not contact our friendly sales staff and get it renewed? It's the only way to keep up with all the great new features we're adding.

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. Also, congratulations to the Socceroos for getting Australia into the World Cup for the first time in 32 years. It almost makes up for losing the Ashes.

See also: Issues Resolved for 2.0

Contents

• Upgrading
• Migration
• New Features
• Notable Bug Fixes
• Outstanding Bugs

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!

Important Migration Notes

Upgrading from 1.4.4

After upgrading to 2.0, 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.

Upgrading from 1.3.5 or Earlier

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

• Release Notes 1.4
• Release Notes 1.3
• Release Notes 1.2
• Release Notes 1.1

New Features

The four major new features in Confluence 2.0 are:

• Rich Text Editing
• Labels for content
• New Dashboard Features for managing sites with large numbers of spaces.
• A dynamic RSS Builder

..but there's a lot more on top of that.

Rich Text Editing

It almost goes without saying that the most highly requested feature in Confluence has been the ability to create pages without having to learn wiki markup. We're glad we can finally offer a powerful "what you see is (pretty much) what you get" rich text editor built into Confluence, making it easier for anyone to contribute to the site.

The WYSIWYG editor is enabled when you install or upgrade to Confluence 2.0. Global Administrators can disable the editor if they want to stick with pure wiki markup, and can also choose which editor users should be presented with by default. (The setting is under "General Configuration" in the administrative console). Users can also choose which editor they prefer simply by clicking on the "Make this my default editor" link that appears on the edit screen.

For the "feature mad" amongst us, here are some neat things you can do with the WYSIWYG editor:

• Full screen view - really useful for editing large pages. 
• Quickly switch between WYSIWYG and Wiki markup without a page refresh
• Change the size of your editing window to suit your browser. Your size preference is remembered across sessions. To change it, drag the handle in the bottom right hand corner of the editor.
• Undo and redo!
  

Labels

Another highly requested feature was the ability to categorize content within Confluence beyond the rigid heirarchy allowed by spaces and parent-child relationships between pages. To this end we have introduced labels: simple one-word 'tags' that can be added to any page or blog-post the user has permission to edit. Labels can be used to categorize content, bookmark it, flag it for attention, or anything else you can think of.

Labels can be added to any page from the edit screen, or through a dynamic interface right when you're viewing a page.
Once a page is labeled, then clicking on the label's name allows you to browse other pages with the same label, or view related labels that commonly occur on the same pages.
You can also view the space's most popular labels from the space browser, to get an idea of the most popular topics within the space.
Personal Labels
If you prepend my: to a label (for example, my:todo or my:favourite, then the label is a personal label - only visible to you. Personal labels allow you to tag content for your own purposes: for example to keep track of pages you feel need your attention, or that contain information you refer to frequently. You can browse your personal labels from your user profile. Any user can add their personal labels to any page, even when they don't have editing permission.
Favorites
Favorites are a special personal label: my:favourite or my:favorite. Whenever you see the icon, it means you can label this content as being your favorite, and whenever you see the icon, it means that the content is currently in your list of favorites. You can view your favorites from the Labels tab of your user profile, or keep track of them on your dashboard.
Label-Aware Macros
Many existing macros have been improved to allow you to filter content based on labels: including the {recent-pages}, {recently-updated} and {blog-posts} macros. We've also added macros that provide more information about labels and labeled content:

• {related-labels} gives a list of labels that might be related to a page
• {listlabels} lists all the labels in a space
• {contentbylabel} lists content that has a particular label
• {recently-used-labels} lists labels that have been recently added or applied
• {navmap} draws a nice-looking table of links to pages with a particular label

Dashboard Features

The Confluence dashboard has been improved to make it easier for you to keep track of only those spaces you are interested in: a big improvement for Confluence sites with large numbers of spaces. The list of spaces is now divided into four tabs (although all four may not be visible):

• All shows you all spaces
• My shows you all spaces you have marked as your favorites (you can mark a space as your favorite from the All tab by clicking on the icon)
• Team shows you all the available 'teams', and the spaces that have been assigned to them
• New shows you any space that has been added in the last week

The recently updated content list on the dashboard will reflect the spaces in your chosen tab. So if you're looking at the My tab, the dashboard will only be showing you the recent updates in your favorite spaces.

*Teams*
Teams are a simple, and very wiki-like way to group spaces together. Space administrators can add "team labels" to a space, which are then used to group those spaces under the team tab on the dashboard. So if your wiki has 100 spaces, but only five of them are of any interest to your sales team, just add a "sales" team label to those five spaces. That will group those spaces together on the dashboard under the 'team' tab, and your sales team need never look at the other 95 spaces.

RSS Builder

Confluence has always provided a brace of useful RSS feeds, but the problem is that for every feed we provided, users asked for half a dozen more. The obvious answer is to let users build RSS feeds based on their own chosen criteria. You can access the RSS builder from the Confluence dashboard

Once in the builder, you can choose

• Which spaces to include in the feed
• Which types of content should be tracked
• Which Release Notes, if any, you are interested in
• How many items to include in the feed
• Whether you want a single RSS entry per page or one for each time the page is edited
• Whether you want an RSS 2.0 or Atom 0.3 feed
• Whether Confluence should require authentication to view the feed
  Once you have decided what you want, Confluence will give you a URL to paste into your RSS reader. These URLs can be shared with other Confluence users, although they will only ever be allowed to see content that they have permission to view. If you have asked to authenticate, Confluence will require HTTP Basic Authentication, which is supported by most RSS readers.

We've also taken the opportunity to improve the presentation of our RSS feeds - including a lot more information in each feed so you can follow your Confluence site entirely from your newsreader.

Other New Features

Record "Change Comments" When Editing a Page

There is now a field on the edit screen for recording a "change comment" when you edit a page. These comments are stored in the page history, and can be used to keep a more complete history of why a page has been edited.
Embed Flash and Movies
You can now embed Flash content or movies (Quicktime or Windows Media) into a page as easily as you can an image: just attach the Flash or movie file to the page, then include it as you would include an image (!filename.mov!).
Export Pages as Word Documents
You can now export pages straight into Word from the Info tab. This is extremely useful for emailing around content to non-Confluence users, printing a document or just creating a backup in Word.
Copy Pages
Also on the Info tab is a "Copy" link that allows you to clone a page in a single click - including making copies of any attachments.
Improved Search Interface
Results returned from Confluence's search engine now have:

• Improved contextual results, showing the most important text around where your query was matched in the page
• Contextual results for any attachment: see where a search was matched even inside PDF, Word, PowerPoint or Excel documents!
• Search results for attachments give you more (and clearer) information about what the attachment is, and where it's from.
  
  

Chart Plugin

The Chart Macro is now shipped with Confluence, allowing you to dynamically generate neat looking charts like this:

Improved Gallery Macro

The gallery macro has been spruced up, and now has a slideshow view:

Additions to the Remote API

Additions to the Confluence Remote API include:

• Comment manipulation
• Label manipulation
• Attachment uploading and editing

• Improved user- and permissions management

  Confluence now uses version 2.0 of the Apache XML-RPC library. Java XML-RPC clients using earlier versions of the Apache XML-RPC libraries (i.e. 1.3 or earlier) may experience problems with responses containing non-ASCII data.

  Also...

• You can download all the attachments on a page in a single zip-file
• Import and restore now have progress indicators
• Backup and restore use significantly less memory
• The embedded database has been upgraded to HSQL 1.8, which should be significantly more reliable
• Collapsed breadcrumbs now expand with a single mouse click

Notable Bug Fixes

We resolved a lot of issues between Confluence 1.4.4 and Confluence 2.0. The best way to see what we've fixed is to ask JIRA, the world's best issue-tracker: Issues Resolved for 2.0

Outstanding Bugs

Some bugs were introduced during the Confluence 2.0 development cycle that we could not fix in time for the final release. Of note are:

• Some pernicious Javascript errors when changing styles in the rich text editor under Internet Explorer
• The rich text editor may not perfectly handle complex pages with structural macros
• Attachments containing high-bit characters in their filenames may not be correctly retrieved by Confluence

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

The Confluence 2.0 Team

Well that's all folks - if you're still reading - thank you for getting this far!