Release Notes 2.8-m6 ("Milestone 6")

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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-m6 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

Milestone 6 incorporates Milestone 5 changes (which were released but never publicly documented, sorry)

Milestone 5 (the missed one)

The user interface improvements include the most drastic changes to be done for Confluence 2.8. After adding a new Actions menu to the page, we have removed the unnecessary tab navigation. This completes our migration to a menu-based user interface. The content of the page is now the most important aspect of the page, as all the editing and modification features are now out of the way when reading a page. The UI has also been improved in other small ways in this milestone, and we have fixed many bugs with the printable view and the default themes.

Plugin components that expect to be injected with the old, deprecated CacheManager interface will now work again. This means plugins such as the JIRA issues macro will be useable once more. Plugins that use the ContainerManager.getComponent method of obtaining the cache manager will continue to malfunction; there is no plan to support this usage. More commentary about this at CONF-10602.

The Page Ordering feature mostly contains bug fixes. The majority of changes are done in the back end as we prepare to remove extJS library and substitute the page tree widget with a custom component.

Milestone 6 (the current one)

User Interface improvements:

  • performance improvements through better clientside-caching on the edit-page
  • user menu has been included. The only thing missing to wrap up the UI changes is to move the remaining icon-buttons (PDF, watch pages, etc) to menu items as well. This will be delivered in two weeks.
  • New and improved Tree component, that lets you drag more comfortably than before
  • Added the ability to cancel a page move by pressing 'esc' after the user starts dragging a page
  • Added automatic scrolling functionality. If a user drags a page to the top/bottom of the screen in an attempt to reach a
    page that is currently outside of the screen, it will automatically scroll up/down.
  • Known problem: No indication of subnodes being loaded
  • bugfixes

Technical improvements and API changes

  • JMX has been added to the list of Confluence capabilities for improved monitoring
  • Raising a support case is now possible directly from the admin console. This will attach logs and other relevent system information automatically.
  • JQuery now default JS library. We have removed ExtJS as a Javascript-dependency, and will standardize on JQuery in all of Confluence
  • Coherence cache lease duration has been set at 10 minutes to support system recovery when threads do not release their leases properly. A warning message will be logged detailing that a lease has timed out to help with tracking down errant lease management.

Known problems

  • We found a severe performance problem during our loadtests. Confluence works exactly like before under low load, but once you go above a request per second you will notice a much higher load than acceptable. We will fix that for the final release.
  • Upgrade issue for clustered deployments. Don't use this Milestone on a Cluster.
  • a few glitches when viewing with IE6&7
Last modified on Mar 5, 2008

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