"What's New"

When a user first logs in to Confluence 3.5, they'll be presented with an AUI dialog box promoting new product features. (We aim to eventually work this feature into all our products.)

The content on this dialog is retrieved from Atlassian's web servers - the following screenshot is a mockup of what the final dialog box might look like.

Like other products that encourage you to actually read their release notes before continuing, the What's New dialog will keep annoying appearing on login until the user clicks "Don't show again". However, you can always access this dialog box again from the Browse Menu:

Revised Dashboard Layout

Previously in Confluence, you could filter the "Recently Updated" section on your dashboard by selecting a tab in the spaces list. For example, clicking on the Favourite tab in the spaces list on the left would limit recent updates on the right to your favourite spaces only).

This was a source of confusion for many users not expecting a tab change on the bottom left to update the recent updates on the top right.

To address the issue, the recent updates section has been given its own set of tabs (which now function independently of the spaces list). In the process, the tabs were also given a face lift and the recent updates section now takes up the entire right hand side of the dashboard.

New Insert JIRA Issue dialog

If you have configured one or more application links (aka 'applinks') to a JIRA server, you can insert a JIRA Issue link into your Confluence page while you're editing the page. You can access this feature via a new JIRA button on the editor toolbar.

When you click it or press Ctrl + Shift + J, you get:

From here you can:
- Embed recently viewed issues
- Create a new issue
- Search for issues

Improved JIRA issues macro

Completely overhauled to support applinks, the JIRA issues macro now supports a single issue key, multiple comma separated issue keys or a JQL query. We've also changed the macro to use the name "jira" (although "jiraissues" will still work).

Finally, the macro now supports OAuth-based authentication from Confluence to JIRA. Note that all new features of the JIRA issues macro require a JIRA application link to be configured.

Here are some examples of using the improved JIRA issues macro:

Share a Page

How many times have you copied a page link, pasted it into an email and sent it off to someone with a little note? The new "Share a page" feature makes this common activity super quick.

More Notification Improvements

One-click 'stop watch' links

• Ask and you shall receive - Clicking the 'Stop watching this page' link in email notifications now automatically removes the watch for you without requiring a confirmation. You can still undo this if you clicked the link by accident.

Even more improvements

• Straight to edit mode - Clicking the 'Change notification preferences' link now takes you directly to edit mode for your email preferences.
• More information - We've added more information at the bottom of email notifications for when you're watching all blogs.
• Links in Plain text - The stop watch links have been made available for those of you receiving emails in plain text.

Space Blog Watches

CONF-6478 is a highly voted for issue, with over 100 votes. The idea is that blog posts are newsworthy updates so you might want to get email notifications for new blog posts without getting emailed for all other activity in the space.

Drag-and-Drop Improvements

Powered by HTML 5 - Drag-and-drop is now powered by HTML5. That means:

• Drag-and-drop works in all browsers, including Chrome!
• If you use a browser that fully supports HTML 5, you'll never get that annoying prompt to install Gears again. It just works.

Drag-and-drop multimedia files - Confluence 3.5-m4 introduced the Multimedia Macro. In this release we added drag and drop - Dragging a multimedia file onto a page will automatically insert the multimedia macro for you.

New {code} macro

The newcode macro project has now been bundled into Confluence, replacing the original code macro in atlassian-renderer.  The new code macro has a number of improvements over the original macro (wider syntax support, copy/paste without getting line numbers in the clipboard).

Space Directory Improvements

We've improved the Space Directory since last milestone. Notable additions since then are:

• Clicking on the space category now switches tabs to that category
• Partial name search in space directory

Scheduled Job Administration

A new Confluence administration screen to monitor, and manage scheduled jobs. This is available through the "Scheduled Job Administration" link in the Confluence admin console. Here are some screenshots:

Applinks

The first cut of applinks has been integrated into Confluence. We will use this as the basis for delivering deeper JIRA integration later in this release.

Performance / Stability

A cache has been added to store page diffs. This should prevent the situation where RSS feeds with diffs can slow down Confluence.

Security

The underlying user management code has been updated so that it now enforces permissions on directories at a low level. This means remote API calls that create or modify users or groups on read only directories will fail and no longer write to the directory as they did in previous 3.5 milestones.

Other improvements

• Fix CSS vendor prefix antipattern
• Multimedia macro UX/UI improvements
• Media items in the image/media autocomplete now display an appropriate icon
• Change Team Labels to Space Categories
• Change blue collapsing arrows to grey
• Display the default welcome message on the General Configuration Admin page
• Display default contact administrator message on General Configuration admin page
• Fix for broken fonts on Windows
• Upgrade to AUI 3.3
• Fix and improve printing DOC theme in IE7
• Log in and Sign up links misaligned
• Capitalise the first letter of category labels in the spaces list and recently updated dashboard macros

Small Improvements Gallery