Welcome back

it's been a while since we shipped Confluence 3.1 in December. Since then, we've been having heaps of fun at our second Lab Week, during which we experimented with all sorts of new technology and crazy ideas, mainly around the editor. We've been busy coding up new features over the last weeks, but also various back-end changes. Milestones 1 and 2 were internal only and didn't show much visual anyway, but now we're getting there.

The Confluence 3.2 development cycle is going to be a short one. We are currently aiming at shipping in Mid March. There will probably be one a M4 milestone in two weeks, but then we're in Beta mode already.

The features

New Links Browser

The new link browser is now available in the editor toolbar (the old one is still there as a backup).

Note: this funky icon is temporary

This new browser now has all the functionality present in the current link popup, except for the recently modified tab. You can now add links to attachments and recently viewed pages, which weren't available in m2. Please raise any bugs found against the linking component in Confluence.

Know issues

• quick search only returns pages
• error messages from the server aren't displayed yet
• usability work still to come (like cursor placement and keyboard navigation)

Documentation theme

We are going to bundle the new Documentation Theme,

Fixed Width Theme

We are introducing a theme that by default has sidebars. The main work here is behind the scenes, fixing up our HTML and CSS so that 3rd-party theme developers will benefit and be able to write such themes more easily.

If you're wondering where the 'sudden green' has come from, it has originated from Confluence's product colour on our website.

Naturally the colour scheme is customisable:

Known issues

• Space Admin screens still need work (site admin screens don't get themes applied, but space admin does)
• There's more polish to go into this theme - mostly small spacing and font size adjustments
• Our minimum resolution is 1024x768; content that doesn't fit at that size won't fit in the fixed width theme either.
• There is a certain discussion around the colours, and wether we should be a bit more conservative in terms of the background. We will keep discussing.
• The main point here is that many bugs have been fixed, and that 3rd-party theme developers will benefit from many under-the-hood bugfixes to our html and css.

Anatoli's 20% project: RSS improvements

• CONF-18372 : changed the feed builder UI so that now you can chose comments/attachments for either pages, blogs, both or none. The new UI will generate slightly different parameters so that they don't interfere with old RSS query format.
  
  There are plans to further improve the UI.

• CONF-9312: changed the behavior of rss feed when filtering by label. Now when you ask for comments and pages with a particular label you will get the labeled pages and comments on those pages.

Backend changes

The Engine Room has upgraded plenty of libaries:

• Many common modules were upgraded.
• Migrated our Sal Plugin into Confluence
• REST Service for retrieving Recently Viewed pages
• Start of REST service for Confluence searches

More documentation about REST will soon follow.

Next steps

There are still heaps of improvements that will make it into 3.2, so stay tuned for M4 and Beta1, both due this month.

Cheers,
The Confluence Development Team