Release Notes 3.0-m9 ("Milestone 9")
For testing use only
Do not use this release to upgrade your production systems.
This release is a public development release ('milestone') leading up to the next Confluence major release. 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.
In supplying milestone releases, our aim is 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 all of our milestone releases even have been performance tested for a while.
However, since our milestones releases are timeboxed (that is, they are 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 that are scheduled to be fixed in the next milestone, or completely new bugs unknown even to us.
Additionally, we have not completed our performance testing and compatibility testing for all supported databases and user management systems. So, for example, a milestone release may behave well on a small installation but show severe problems when subjected to many users.
Upgrade Procedure
Follow the normal upgrade instructions to upgrade your test instance to this release. We strongly recommend that you backup your Confluence home directory and database before upgrading!
Downloads
All development releases are available from the development releases page on the Atlassian website.
Summary
We are one week away from feature freeze, so this is the last major milestone before we enter beta next week. We are still working on some wording, on some plugin upgrades, and a few UI tweaks, but M9 is pretty much how Confluence 3 will look like. From now on, it's mainly about fixing up non-critical bugs and doing code reviews. Many Code reviews! 
Enjoy:
Community
Followed Users and Favorite Spaces
The terminology has been cleaned up and made consistent across the application. If you want to see what a user is doing you follow them, if you want to see what happens in a space, you mark that space as favorite. You can mark a personal space as favorite, and this is independent of following the user who owns the space.
One area we still want to improve is the 'User Follow' menu item and profile tab, which needs a better name.
Follow Tab RSS and Design Improvements
You can now get an RSS feed on any user's 'User Follow' tab. This feed will include all activity of the users followed by that person. This is a great new way of monitoring content on the Extranet.
We've redesigned the follow tab to highlight the activity information more and handle large lists of followers. We also added some clarifying text to this tab to better describe the different sections of this page.
There is now a maximum number of followers shown on this page, and separate pages to show the complete list. This addresses the performance and usability problems discovered in the previous milestone when you had a large number of followers or people following you.
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Profile Page Updates
The layout of the profile page has been changed to try to improve the visiblity of the activity. This puts the user's personal information over on the right hand side of the page.
On the left hand side, we now have new links to follow a user and favorite their space.
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Update User Status Permission
A new global permission was introduced to give system administrators control over who can use the user status feature.
If the permission is turned off for a user (or their group) then they will not have the ability to set their user status, nor will they have an 'Status Updates' tab in their profile.
Macro Browser
Macro Browser in the RTE
The Macro Browser is now finally available in the Confluence rich text editor (RTE)! It will assist you in inserting and editing macros, without having to understand the wiki markup.
Editing a macro can be done by placing the cursor in the start or end tags of the macro wiki markup. If you have context menus enabled, you will also see a new option for insert/editing macros.
Upgraded Macro Icons
Thanks to Stephen, we have even better icons for the macros in the macro browser. Check 'em out!
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AUI 1.0
Confluence is now using the first release of AUI, 1.0.
PDF Export
Many bug fixes have been done for the new PDF export:
Release Notes 3.0-m9 ("Milestone 9") - PDF Export converts a bulleted sublist into a numbered sublist
Release Notes 3.0-m9 ("Milestone 9") - Follow macro should not include the 'Add' action when exported to PDF
Release Notes 3.0-m9 ("Milestone 9") - PDF Space Export text uses US spelling instead of Australian
Release Notes 3.0-m9 ("Milestone 9") - PDF Export from a page with non-default theme is trying to use the old method, and so it fails with an error
Release Notes 3.0-m9 ("Milestone 9") - column and section macros render differently in PDF export when they have borders
Release Notes 3.0-m9 ("Milestone 9") - IM presence macro shows a roque nbsp when exporting to PDF
Release Notes 3.0-m9 ("Milestone 9") - The PDF export doesn't recognize all literal colors when used in the color macro
Release Notes 3.0-m9 ("Milestone 9") - PDF Export from the Info pages is trying to use the old method, and so it fails with an error
Engine Room
Confluence has been upgraded to the latest releases of Plugins 2 and SAL.