12 October 2010

With great pleasure, Atlassian presents Confluence 3.4, with more ways to extend your wiki, manage your plugins and go places quickly.

Highlights of this Release:

More:

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Video of What's New:

Highlights of Confluence 3.4

 

New Keyboard Shortcuts, Mac-Friendly Too

Confluence has a number of new keyboard shortcuts to aid both navigation and editing. If you are already using JIRA 4.1, you will notice that we have made an effort to be as consistent as possible. Confluence shortcuts now support the standard Mac 'Cmd' key.

Some examples of shortcuts to use when viewing a page or blog post:

c

Create a child page.

b

Create a blog post.

m

Comment on a page or a blog post.

e

Open the editor.

Try these from within the Rich Text Editor:

Ctrl+s or Cmd+s

Save the page.

Ctrl+Alt+7 or Cmd+Alt+7

Apply the default paragraph style.

Read more about keyboard shortcuts.

 

Keyboard Shortcut Dialog

Confluence has many useful keyboard shortcuts. Now it's easy to discover them. Select 'Keyboard Shortcuts' from the 'Browse' menu or just press '?' on your keyboard. The new keyboard shortcut dialog shows shortcut keys for the editor as well as for general use.

See the documentation on keyboard shortcuts.

 

User Macros in Macro Browser and Autocomplete

Looking for a macro to add to your page?

  • User macros easy to find. User macros are short pieces of code that perform an often-used function or add some custom formatting to a page. You can now choose which of your user macros are visible to everyone in the macro browser and autocomplete.
  • New options for writing user macros. It's easy to create a user macro. Just go to the Confluence Administration Console and enter the details. Confluence 3.4 offers new options for making your macro look good in the macro browser. Read all about writing user macros. You can specify the macro category, link to an icon, define the parameters that the macro browser will use to prompt the user for information, and more.
  • Working examples of user macros. To help you get started, we have documented the Expand and Status user macros. These are working examples that you can add to your Confluence site.

Here is an example of a user macro, the Expand macro, appearing in the autocomplete dropdown:

It looks like this in the macro browser:

Read about the macro browser and autocomplete.

 

New Plugin Manager

Managing plugins and performing Confluence upgrades is now much easier with the brand new plugin manager. The Universal Plugin Manager (UPM) is now bundled with Confluence and will soon make its way into our other tools, including JIRA. With the UPM you can:

  • Perform a plugin compatibility check before upgrading Confluence.
  • Install new plugins from the Atlassian Plugin Exchange.
  • Manage existing plugins.
  • With just one click, upgrade all plugins that have updates available.
  • View and track updates via the audit log.

See the documentation on managing plugins. Discover, download and install new plugins from the Atlassian Plugin Exchange without leaving Confluence.

 

Improved Performance

Confluence is faster in a couple of ways.

  • Loading of the dashboard. If your Confluence site has a large number of spaces, you may notice that the dashboard now loads much faster. For details, see issue CONF-5446.
  • Daily email updates. The performance of the job that sends the daily email updates has been improved significantly. The job may run up to 100 times faster depending on your configuration. For details, see issue CONF-13875.

 

Other Improvements

We have made a number of small improvements to Confluence screens and other functionality described below.

  • Space permissions. A new dropdown menu on the space permissions screen enables you to select or deselect all the permission types at once.
  • Dashboard 'Recently Updated' section. The list of recent updates on the dashboard now tells you what action the user performed (for example, created, updated or commented) and has a timestamp for each activity.
  • Permissions for PDF stylesheets. Space administrators can now edit the PDF stylesheets and layouts. Previously, you had to be a system administrator to have access to these options in the space administration screen.
  • Space details and space exports. The space details screen has a new, fresh look. Similarly, we have redesigned the screen for PDF, HTML and XML exports.
  • Database Support. We have added support for the following database servers:
  • Improved security for users. This release brings an improved workflow for resetting your password. Confluence now requires an additional confirmation check before allowing a password change. We have also tightened the security of the 'remember me' functionality. As an additional security measure, Confluence will prompt you for your password when you change your email address.

 

Infrastructure Changes

Plugin developers will find some improvements in this release too.

  • Shared Access Layer. SAL 2.2 includes support for secure administrator sessions ('WebSudo') and a cross-application API for accessing user profiles. See Shared Access Layer 2.2 Release Notes​.
  • REST plugin module. We have upgraded from version 2.0 to version 2.2 of the Atlassian REST Plugin. Now you have more reliable detection of automatic logout, the ability to include JSON examples in your documentation, and support for secure administrator sessions ('WebSudo'). See REST Plugin 2.1 Release Notes​ and REST Plugin 2.2 Release Notes​.
  • Atlassian Plugin Development Platform. With Confluence 3.4 comes the first public announcement of the Atlassian Plugin Development Platform​. Using Atlassian's plugin development tools, developers can create plugins that extend the functionality of Atlassian applications such as JIRA, Confluence and others. The Atlassian Plugin Development Platform defines the set of tools a plugin developer can use. See Plugin Development Platform 2.8 Release Notes​.

Release Notices

The Confluence 3.4 Team

Development

Bugfixing and Maintenance
Anna Dominguez
Joseph Clark
Don Willis
Craig Petchell
Niraj Bhawnani

Engine Room & Security
Stefan Saasen
Daniel Kjellin
Anatoli Kazatchkov
Richard Atkins

Editor Improvements
David Taylor
Jared Wyles
Matthew Erickson
Brian Nguyen

Small Improvements
Edith Tom

Plugin Updates
David Chui

Special Projects (not shipping in this release)
Agnes Ro
Alan Davis
Ben Buchanan
Charles Miller
Chris Kiehl
David Loeng
Matt Ryall
Paul Curren
Ryan Thomas

Team Lead
Jonathan Gilbert

Support

Amsterdam
Ajay Sridhar
Sherali Karimov
Tony Atkins

Brazil
Alyson Reis
Guilherme Heck
Hugo Vares Vieira
Jean Fabricius Bondan
Luzia Mendes
Marco Roman
Rodrigo Adami
Rafael Pereira de Sousa




Kuala Lumpur
Azwandi Mohd Aris
Heng Hwa
Henry CL Tiong
Husein Alatas
Joachim Ooi
Sashidaran Jayaraman
Zed Yap

San Francisco
Adam Laskowski
Jeremy Largman
Marian Finch
Timothy Wong
Vincent Chang
Wayne Tombo

Sydney
Donna McGahan
Gurleen Anand
Michael Seager
Partha Kamal
Roy Hartono
Vincent Choy

Others

Design
Stephen Russell

Performance Engineering
George Barnett
Jed Wesley-Smith

Product Management
Bill Arconati
Sherif Mansour

Product Marketing Management
Matthew Hodges
Ryan Anderson

Quality Assurance
Andrew Prentice
Mark Hrynczak
Marlena Compton

Technical Writing
Andrew Lui
Sally Hawse
Sarah Maddox