Welcome to our Beta Phase

The Confluence team is proud to present the first public beta release of our upcoming Confluence 3 release. It contains all the features we intend to ship. We will be publishing Beta 3 next week, and then a rapid succession of Release Candidates in two weeks. We aim at shipping Confluence 3.0 in (very) early June.

So, calling all plugin developers: If you want to make sure your plugin plays nicely with 3.0 on the launch date, and if you maybe even want to use our new features from within your plugin, this is really the last chance to get started. Download the Beta right now

Note: This is still not a stable release, it is not meant for production use. So our normal Milestone disclaimer still applies:

Milestone release advisory

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 public development release ("Milestone") leading up to Confluence 3.0, which will be probably shipped in mid-Q2/2009. 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 Safe

Development releases are snapshots of the ongoing Confluence development process. As such:

  • While we try to keep these releases stable, they have not undergone the same degree of testing as a full release.
  • Features in development releases may be 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 DRs, or from any DR to the eventual final release. So it's possible that you won't be able to migrate any data you store in a Confluence DR to a future Confluence release.

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 all of our milestone releases even have been 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 2.10.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.

What is in it?

All the features we intend to ship are available in this beta. Unfortunately. the official documentation is not ready yet, so until we get a more official summary of the new features, please refer to our recent Milestone release notes, and try the beta out yourself.

Improvements

Since publishing Milestone 9, we have focussed on polishing our existing features. Here is a rundown on the changes since then:

Community features

Some important bug fixes:

Some IE issues: CONF-15497, CONF-15137, CONF-15474, CONF-15421, CONF-14593
Improvements to User Follow: CONF-15335, CONF-15279, CONF-15427, CONF-15286, CONF-15016
Removed the annoying page reload when following a user, CONF-15290

Macro Browser

Preview button removed and replaced by a refresh icon:

Some important bug fixes:

CONF-14720Inserting a macro via the macro browser would always scroll to the top, which is very annoying if you are editing the end of the page.

CONF-15487 It is now possible to insert more than one macro in Safari via the macro browser!

Office Connector

CONF-14798 Performance improvements on the backend for the viewfile macro.

Also, the initial loading of the Flash front end should be a little snappier. There was a default "pre-load" screen that added 1-2 seconds to the load time. We also changed the background color to white so it also adds the impression of not appearing until it's loaded.

old

new

Engine Room

Confluence has been upgraded to the latest releases of Plugins 2 and SAL.

We did a small performance improvement by caching PersonalInformation objects by user name (CONF-15484), which will in particular speed up the rendering of profile pictures.

As part of this release cycle we fixed a lot of smaller bugs, but the most notable ones were related to content indexing:

CONF-15352 Fixed a race condition during content indexing which would result in leaked file handles, which had been introduced in M9
CONF-15483 Fixed a problem with a reindex being started before the plugin system was loaded. This would result in empty documents in the index.

Random

CONF-14322 was fixed, so change comments containing ampersands and angle brackets will no longer affect the system.

Known Issues

The Flash preview is broken in Office Connector that is bundled with beta 2. See CONF-15612. It's already fixed and it will be bundled in Beta 3 next week.

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