Release Notes 3.2-m3 ("Milestone 3")
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.
Welcome back
it's been a while since we shipped Confluence 3.1 in December. Since then, we've been having heaps of fun at our second Lab Week, during which we experimented with all sorts of new technology and crazy ideas, mainly around the editor. We've been busy coding up new features over the last weeks, but also various back-end changes. Milestones 1 and 2 were internal only and didn't show much visual anyway, but now we're getting there.
The Confluence 3.2 development cycle is going to be a short one. We are currently aiming at shipping in Mid March. There will probably be one a M4 milestone in two weeks, but then we're in Beta mode already.
The features
New Links Browser
The new link browser is now available in the editor toolbar (the old one is still there as a backup).
Note: this funky icon is temporary
This new browser now has all the functionality present in the current link popup, except for the recently modified tab. You can now add links to attachments and recently viewed pages, which weren't available in m2. Please raise any bugs found against the linking component in Confluence.
Know issues
- quick search only returns pages
- error messages from the server aren't displayed yet
- usability work still to come (like cursor placement and keyboard navigation)
Documentation theme
We are going to bundle the new Documentation Theme,
Fixed Width Theme
We are introducing a theme that by default has sidebars. The main work here is behind the scenes, fixing up our HTML and CSS so that 3rd-party theme developers will benefit and be able to write such themes more easily.
If you're wondering where the 'sudden green' has come from, it has originated from Confluence's product color on our website.
Naturally the color scheme is customizable:
Known issues
- Space Admin screens still need work (site admin screens don't get themes applied, but space admin does)
- There's more polish to go into this theme - mostly small spacing and font size adjustments
- Our minimum resolution is 1024x768; content that doesn't fit at that size won't fit in the fixed width theme either.
- There is a certain discussion around the colors, and wether we should be a bit more conservative in terms of the background. We will keep discussing.
- The main point here is that many bugs have been fixed, and that 3rd-party theme developers will benefit from many under-the-hood bugfixes to our html and css.
Anatoli's 20% project: RSS improvements
- Release Notes 3.2-m3 ("Milestone 3") : changed the feed builder UI so that now you can chose comments/attachments for either pages, blogs, both or none. The new UI will generate slightly different parameters so that they don't interfere with old RSS query format.
There are plans to further improve the UI.
- Release Notes 3.2-m3 ("Milestone 3"): changed the behavior of rss feed when filtering by label. Now when you ask for comments and pages with a particular label you will get the labeled pages and comments on those pages.
Backend changes
The Engine Room has upgraded plenty of libaries:
- Many common modules were upgraded.
- Migrated our Sal Plugin into Confluence
- REST Service for retrieving Recently Viewed pages
- Start of REST service for Confluence searches
More documentation about REST will soon follow.
Next steps
There are still heaps of improvements that will make it into 3.2, so stay tuned for M4 and Beta1, both due this month.
Cheers,
The Confluence Development Team