Release Notes 2.8-m3 ("Milestone 3")

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Do not use this release to upgrade your production systems.

For all production use and testing of Confluence, please use the latest official release.

Confluence 2.8-m3 is a milestone development release for 2.8. This is a public development release (DR) leading up to Confluence 2.8. Development releases are a snapshot of our work in progress, allowing our customers and especially plugin-developers to see what we're up to.

Who should upgrade?

Development releases are not production ready. Development releases are snapshots of the ongoing Confluence development process. While we try to keep these releases stable, they have not undergone the same degree of testing as a full release, and could contain features that are incomplete or may change or be removed before the next full release.

No upgrade path. Because development releases represent work in progress, we cannot provide a supported upgrade path between development releases, or from any development release to a final release. You may not be able to migrate any data you store in a Confluence development release to a future Confluence release.

Atlassian does not provide support for development releases.

Our milestone releases aim to provide plugin developers with an opportunity to see the latest changes in the code.

Each milestone release has passed all our automatic tests, and has been used for one week on our official internal Confluence server. Most of the issues solved have been reviewed too.

However, since our milestones releases are timeboxed (i.e. they get released every two weeks, no matter how far we have come implementing features and bugfixes), there is always a chance that we have new known bugs, which are scheduled to be fixed in the next milestone, or completely new bugs unknown even to us.

Milestone releases have not been load- or stress-tested. So, for example, they might behave well on a small installation but show severe problems when subjected to many users.

Upgrade Procedure

Follow the normal upgrade instructions to upgrade from Confluence 2.7.x to this release. We strongly recommend that you backup your confluence-home directory and database before upgrading!

Downloads

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

Issues resolved or improved in this release

  • First draft of UI improvements: We are working hard on moving the HTML and CSS delivered by Confluence towards standards-compliance and accessibility. We are at the same time reworking our UI structure. We feel that the UI has been growing a bit too organically over the past years, resulting in somewhat confusing navigation like the "remove page"-button only available when you are editing a page, for example. We have implemented an initial dropdown-menu for adding content, thus already cleaning up the UI a bit. All the navigation-changes we make are targetted at the default theme, however some HTML&CSS changes may also affect the other themes.
    In the future our changes will enable plugin-developers to hook into Confluence easier than before, and skinning Confluence will be considerably easier. However, plugin-developers should be aware of the changes we are making, and check (by examining this Milestone release) whether they have to schedule some maintenance work for their plugins. More changes will be made, so don't rush it - but plan for it.
  • First draft of Page Reordering. We are working on implementing a highly anticipated feature that will dramatically improve the quality of content generated from a Confluence space. So far the PDF files you generate from Confluence have been alphabetically ordered - which for example makes even the Confluence User Manual quite awkward to read. With the new page ordering feature it will be able to structure your Wiki exactly as you like - or of course leave it in alphabetic mode if you prefer that. Our goal is to deliver a really useful solution, and this Milestone only shows you the first 50% of the feature. We are currently busy implementing all the feedback and bug-reports we get from Sarah (our documentation queen) and the next Milestone releases will deliver further improvements and bugfixes.

You can view the complete list of fixes and newly implemented features in JIRA. They contain all the issues resolved during development of 2.8, not just the ones fixed since the previous milestone.

Known problems

No major known problems, but plenty of smaller to medium sized bugs, mainly related to page reordering. They will get tackled in M4.

Last modified on Jan 29, 2008

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