Below are some important notes on upgrading to Confluence 4.3. For details of the new features and improvements in this release, please read the Confluence 4.3 Release Notes.

On this page:

Preparing your team for Confluence 4

If you are upgrading to Confluence 4 for the first time (coming from Confluence 3.5 or earlier) then please note that the change to the Confluence editing experience is significant. People in your organisation will need to be aware of the coming changes, so that they can plan and prepare for them. We have written some guides to help you:

Planning for Confluence 4

 

Upgrade notes

End of support for DB2 and PostgreSQL 8.2

As previously announced, from this release onwards we no longer offer support for the following database platforms:

  • No versions of DB2 database are supported. For help with moving from DB2 to a supported database, please refer to the list of supported databases and the guide to migrating to another database.
  • Version 8.2 of PostgreSQL database is not supported.

Please see End of Support Announcements for Confluence.

Removal of JIRA Portlet macro

The JIRA Portlet macro is no longer supported. Gadgets replaced portlets in JIRA 4.0 and Confluence 3.1. We deprecated the use of JIRA portlets in Confluence 4.2 (see the Confluence 4.2 upgrade notes) and have removed the portlet code in Confluence 4.3. Pages that contain the macro will no longer display information drawn from JIRA. Instead, they will show an error reporting that the macro does not exist. To prevent this behaviour, please upgrade to a version of JIRA that supports gadgets, and follow the instructions in How to migrate from JIRA Issues and JIRA portlets to gadgets.

Active Objects bundled

Confluence 4.3 ships with the Active Objects plugin. If you have previously installed Active Objects into your Confluence 4.2 site, you will need to uninstall it before upgrading to Confluence 4.2. This is because user-installed plugins override bundled plugins.

Migration of templates from wiki markup to the rich text format

As part of the Confluence upgrade, an automatic migration of your page templates will take place. This is a non-destructive process. Your existing content is not overwritten. Instead, the migration process will create a new version of each space template and each global template on your Confluence site. The new version will use the new XML storage format, so that you can edit the templates in the Confluence rich text editor.

This process is automatic, and you should not need to take any action. For more details about the upgrade process, see Migration of Templates from Wiki Markup to XHTML-Based Storage Format.

Advance notice: End of support for Java 6 in Confluence 5.0

We are planning to end support for Java 6 (JRE and JDK 1.6) in Confluence 5.0. See End of Support Announcements for Confluence.

Advance notice: End of support for Tomcat 5.5.x in Confluence 5.0

We are planning to end support for Tomcat 5.5.x in Confluence 5.0. See End of Support Announcements for Confluence.

Plain text emails no longer available

Emails are now only available in HTML format, which allows for the display of images and formatted content, such as changes made and the full content of the updated page or blog post.

Upgrade procedure

Note: Upgrade to a test environment first. Test your upgrades in your test environment before rolling them into production.

If you are already running a version of Confluence, please follow these instructions to upgrade to the latest version:

  1. Before you upgrade, we strongly recommend that you back up your Confluence Home Directory and database. See the documentation on backing up your Confluence site. If you are using an external database, perform a database backup.
  2. If your version of Confluence is earlier than 4.2, read the release notes and upgrade guides for all releases between your version and the latest version.
    In particular:
    • Please read the Confluence 3.5 Upgrade Notes.
    • If you are upgrading from 2.1 or earlier, please also read the 2.2 release notes.
    • If your site contains links to a file system (for example [\\\C:\Foo\Bar\foobarpreso.ppt] these may break when upgrading to Confluence 4.3.x.  We recommend that you upgrade directly to Confluence 5.0.3. Refer to  CONF-23575 - Getting issue details... STATUS  for more details. 
  3. Download the latest version of Confluence.
  4. Follow the instructions in the Upgrade Guide.

Checking for known issues and troubleshooting the Confluence upgrade

After you have completed the steps required to upgrade your Confluence installation, check all the items on the Confluence post-upgrade checklist to ensure that everything works as expected. If something is not working correctly, please check for known Confluence issues and try troubleshooting your upgrade as described below:

  • Check for known issues. Sometimes we find out about a problem with the latest version of Confluence after we have released the software. In such cases we publish information about the known issues in the Confluence Knowledge Base. Please check the known issues for the relevant release on this page of the Knowledge Base and follow the instructions to solve the problem.

  • Did you encounter a problem during the Confluence upgrade? Please refer to the guide to troubleshooting upgrades in the Confluence Knowledge Base.

  • If you encounter a problem during the upgrade and cannot solve it, please create a support ticket and one of our support engineers will help you.
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