Highlights of Confluence 4.2 Beta 1:

Page Layouts

Page layouts offer a quick and easy way to add sections and columns to a page. Choose a predefined layout, add the content to each section, and you're done. It's a great way of creating a common page structure, so that readers know where to find the information on each page. Don't worry, the Section and Column macros are still available too.

A two-column page layout in edit mode

Likes

Has someone written a mind-blowingly cool post on Confluence? Click the Like button to them know. It's quick and easy to make their day! Confluence has like buttons on every page, blog post and comment. If enough people like your post, it will show on the dashboard's new popular tab. The information in your personalised summary email is based on the number of people in your network who have liked the content.

Likes on a page and on comments

Quick Comments

Showing people a picture of themselves is a great way to encourage them to say something! We want to encourage people to comment on Confluence pages and blog posts, so we have added an inviting empty comment, showing the user's avatar, at the bottom of the page. This replaces the rather uninviting Add Comment button in earlier versions. And here's what we are really proud of: When you click the box to write a comment, the full editor loads instantly. Boom! No page refresh required.

Invitation to add a comment

Popular Content on the Dashboard

Want to see what's trending? The new Popular tab on the dashboard shows the pages and blog posts that attracting most attention, based on the number of comments and likes.

New popular content tab on the dashboard

Personalised Summary Email

Confluence sends out a weekly summary of the news that interests you. Each email message is tailored according to the spaces you follow and your network. This is a great way of drawing people into the wiki discussions even if they are infrequent users of Confluence. You can opt in or out of the recommended updates summary via an option on the email settings page of your user profile.

Personalised summary of Confluence news and updates

Attachment Labels

You can now label attachments, just as you can label pages and blog posts. Using the Attachments macro, you can filter to show documents or other attachments with a specific label. The Content by Label macro also displays attachments (alongside pages, blog posts and spaces) with a given label.

Labels on attachments

Share Notifications Showing All People Notified

If someone shared a page with you, it's nice to know who else they shared it with. We introduced sharing of pages and blog posts in Confluence 3.5. Just click Share and follow the prompts. Confluence sends an email message to the people that you have specified. In this release, when someone shares a page with you, the email message shows the other people they shared it with too.

Other people sharing the page

Gadget Subscriptions

Confluence  4.2 includes Atlassian Gadgets 3.2, with gadget subscriptions. This means that you can quickly add all the gadgets from your JIRA, Bamboo, FishEye or Crucible site – or from another Confluence site – to your Confluence gadget directory, for easy addition to your Confluence pages. To subscribe to another site's gadgets, go to Confluence Admin > External Gadgets and click the new Gadget Feeds tab.

Subscribing to another application's gadgets

Other Improvements

• We have fixed the following bug: CONF-6246 - Getting issue details... STATUS
• The permissions for personal spaces are now more in line with Confluence's philosophy of encouraging collaboration. When you create a personal space, the option that allows registered users to update content is selected by default. You will also be assigned as a watcher of your new personal space. 
• Blog comments now include an 'author' lozenge to allow you to quickly scan a page for comments from the author.
  

Infrastructure Changes

• Confluence now uses version 2.0 of the Universal Plugin Manager (UPM).
• Confluence 4.2 includes Atlassian Gadgets 3.2
• From this release of Confluence, we support PostgreSQL 9.0 as well as 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4.
• The implementation of quick comments required some pretty significant changes to the editor’s initialisation code. This will have consequences for some Confluence plugins. Details are in this blog post: JavaScript Changes Required for Confluence 4.2 Compatibility. .