27 March 2013

Highlights of Confluence 5.1

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• Read the upgrade notes for important information about this release.
• See the full list of issues resolved in this release.

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Video introducing blueprints

Introducing blueprints

Blank pages are a thing of the past. Choose 'Create' and select a blueprint.

• Create meeting notes, shared file lists, requirements documentation and more.
• View blueprint pages and summary information on special index pages.
• Customise blueprint templates to make each blueprint do exactly what you need.
• Get more blueprints in the Atlassian Marketplace.

Note: Blueprints do not currently support internationalisation. This is on our short-term roadmap, as something we want to address soon. See our knowledge base article on this issue.

This is just the beginning. Read on to find out about our first three blueprints.

Meeting Notes blueprint

The Meeting Notes blueprint helps you to plan your meetings and share notes and actions with your team.

File List blueprint

Use the File List blueprint to create lists of files to share with your team. It's great for organising documents, images and presentations.

Product Requirements blueprint

The Product Requirements blueprint helps you to define, scope and track requirements for your product or feature.

New template features

We've added some great new features to Confluence's page templates. These improvements are available in user-created templates as well as the new blueprints.

Customisable blueprints

An important part of a blueprint is the template. You can update the template, just like any other Confluence template. This means you can adapt the content of the blueprint pages to suit your specific needs in a space or across your whole site. For example, you might update the Meeting Notes blueprint to include a heading for apologies. More...

Instructional text in templates

Do you need to tell authors how to use a template, and what to put where? You can now add instructional text to your templates. This text is only visible in the editor and disappears when the author of the page begins typing. Find this handy feature under the new 'Templates' menu in the template editor, along with variables.  

Create from Template macro

This new macro satisfies a popular request: you can now add a button to a page, prompting people to create content based on a specific template. When someone chooses the button, the macro opens the editor, ready to add a new page with content from the given template. More...

Template descriptions

Administrators can now edit the description of user-created space and site templates. Template descriptions appear in the 'Create' dialog and are useful for explaining the purpose of a template.

HTML5 viewers for PDF and PowerPoint files

The PDF and PowerPoint View File macros macros now use HTML5 instead of Flash. This means your content loads faster and can be viewed on a wider range of devices. 

See the new viewer in action in this meeting notes page.

Page Properties Report macro

If you've never used these macros before, you don't know what you're missing. The Page Properties Report macro presents a tabulated summary of metadata that has been embedded on Confluence pages via the Page Properties macro.

In this release, we have added new parameters to the Page Properties Report macro. You can now specify the spaces to show data from, and the columns to include in the report. See this macro in action in the Product Requirements blueprint.

Improved macros

We're continuing to make our existing macros look and work even better.

Attachments macro

This macro has been given a facelift. You can now expand each file in the list to:

• Preview the attachment inline, without leaving the page.
• See the attachment's labels and version history.
• Edit or remove the attachment.

See this macro in action in the File List blueprint.

Status macro

This macro has also received some love. The status lozenge is now thinner and allows you to choose between a solid or outline style. We've added blue to the range of colours.
 

More goodness

Image titles and alt text

You can now add an image title and alternative (alt) text via the image properties panel. Select an image and choose 'Properties'. Titles appear when you hover over an image or when viewing the full size image. Alt text is available to screen readers and when an image cannot be shown. Border effects now also appear in the 'Properties' option.

Autocomplete when restricting a page to a group

Do you love it when Confluence autocompletes the username when you are restricting a page? Now autocomplete is also available when you want to restrict a page to a group.

Searching the Create dialog

Confluence 5.0 introduced the 'Create' dialog. Now we've added a handy search field to help you find the template or blueprint
you need. Why scroll when you can search!

PDF export improvements

We have improved the way our PDF export handles images, making spaces with many images export more efficiently.

Workbox notifications

Notifications in your workbox will be automatically marked as 'read' if you have already viewed the page or blog post. Nice!

Quick access to admin functions via search box

Start typing what you want to do into the Confluence search box. The matching administrative functions will appear with a cog icon at the top of the search results.

Type 'GG' to get there even faster: Press 'G' twice on your keyboard to put your cursor in the search box, then continue typing the action you want. If you use JIRA, you will recognise the 'GG' combination because the same shortcut opens the JIRA administration search dialog.

System administration, Confluence administration and space administration options may appear in the search results. You will only see the options that you have permission to perform.

Infrastructure changes and API improvements

These are points of interest to plugin and add-on developers. For a full description of these changes, please see our guide to preparing for Confluence 5.1.

Blueprints for developers

Calling all add-on developers! We have some excellent resources to help you create your own blueprints:

• Writing a Blueprint
• Hello Blueprint Example (on Bitbucket)
• Instructional Text in Blueprints  
• Writing a Blueprint - Intermediate
• Writing a Blueprint - Advanced

Extending the image properties dialog

Confluence 5.1 introduces a new pluggable image properties dialog. If you are building an add-on that extends an image (such as an image map, image manipulation, and so on) you should consider using the image properties dialog. See Extending the Image Properties Dialog.

Labels tidied up

We have simplified and improved the labels code, and added some REST resources:

• We have deleted two Velocity (vm) files. Please adjust any plugins that use them:
  • label-listitems.vm – This provided a for-each loop over another template. You should be able to get the same functionality from labels-list.vm.
  • labels-dialog.vm – We now use the Soy version of this template.
• Labels now follow the ADG/AUI Labels guidelines. Your plugin should use these guidelines too, so that it automatically inherits AUI changes in future releases.

Support for Internet Explorer 10

We now support Internet Explorer 10. See Supported Platforms.