The 'What's New' dialog pops up automatically when a user logs in for the first time after a major Confluence upgrade. The dialog displays a summary of the new features for the release, sourced from the Atlassian website (by default).

Confluence administrators can configure the behaviour of the 'What's New' dialog, as follows:

  • Change the URL that the 'What's New' dialog retrieves information from.
  • Disable the dialog.

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Changing the 'What's New' Dialog URL

The 'What's New' dialog URL is stored in your Confluence help-paths.properties file. This URL is a concatenation of the help.prefix property with the help.whats.new.iframe.link.

Note: The help.prefix property also defines the base URL for Confluence help links, i.e. help links in the Confluence application.

To change the 'What's New' Dialog URL:
Follow the instructions in the 'Changing the Links for Individual Help Pages' section on Local Confluence Documentation. You will need to update the 'help.prefix' and 'help.whats.new.iframe.link' properties, as desired.

For example, you may have installed your Confluence documentation behind a firewall at http://www.example.com/ and created a page http://www.example.com/whatsnew that you use for change management. In this case, you would do the following:

There is an additional property 'help.whats.new.full.link'. This is only used if the content pointed to by the updated URL isn't loaded in 10 seconds, in which case a 'timeout' screen is displayed with a link to the full 'What's New' content. For locally-hosted pages you can just set this property to the same value as help.whats.new.iframe.link.

Disabling the 'What's New' Dialog

The 'What's New' dialogue is enabled via a plugin. To disable the 'What's New' dialogue, you need to disable the 'Confluence What's New' plugin in Confluence.

To disable the 'Confluence What's New' plugin:
Follow the instructions on Disabling and enabling apps. Please note, the 'Confluence What's New' plugin is a 'System Plugin'. Click 'Show System Plugins' on the Manage Add-ons administration page to display the system plugins.

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