Release Notes 2.9-rc1 ("Release Candidate 1")
Do not use this release to upgrade your production systems.
For all production use and testing of Confluence, please use the latest official release.
This release is a milestone development release for 2.9. This is a public development release (DR) leading up to Confluence 2.9. 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, and usually milestone releases even have been load- and performance-tested for a while.
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.
Additionally, our performance-testing and compatibility testing for databases and application servers is not done to the full extent. So, for example, a milestone release 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 2.8.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
We are now at the end of the 2.9 release cycle.
We have released our first release candidate RC1 today, you can see it on our public Confluence installation at http://confluence.atlassian.com. We are aware of one remaining major bug that we want to fix (JIRA-issues macro not working in preview mode), but apart from that and some minor fixes we will not change the code anymore.
While this is not the final release, and the official release notes will be unveiled next week, you should definitly have a look now if everything still works fine with your plugins, if you haven't done so yet. We made some changes to the plugin subsystem and to the action class hierarchy (please refer to the other milestone release notes), and we are aware of some plugins (such as the Gliffy plugin) which had to get changed a bit to be compatible with 2.9.
The RC1 is functionally almost equivalent to M5/M6 which was announced in early July, but has a big amount of additional bugfixes, check out our roadmap in the JIRA project at http://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF?report=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.project:roadmap-panel for more details.
Known problems
Jira-issues macro does not work in preview mode.