The Atlassian Confluence team is delighted to present Confluence 2.6.

Confluence 2.6 brings many popular features which save you time and improve the your wiki's usability. Upgrading to Confluence 2.6 is free for all customers with active Confluence software maintenance as at 27th September 2007.

A new theme brings a fresh, clean look and feel. This is for our customers who have asked for a friendlier interface and improved readability. We've included more social networking features, to enhance the sense of community in your wiki. For example, author photos are now shown in comments and in the 'Recent Updates' on the Dashboard. And the Social Bookmarking plugin is now shipped with Confluence, allowing you to share bookmarks with your team.

Other popular new features include default content for spaces, labels on templates, the ability to backdate or rename news items (blog posts), official MySQL 5.0 support and PDF export of images.

  • Many thanks for your issues and votes. They help us keep improving our products.
  • We've highlighted the main features of this release below.
  • Attached is a full list of issues resolved in 2.6.

    • Upgrading Confluence should be fairly straightforward. Please refer to the upgrade instructions and notes . We strongly recommend that you back up your confluence.home directory and database before upgrading!
    • All draft pages will be destroyed during the upgrade process. Confluence administrators should warn users of the Confluence site that drafts will not survive the upgrade.
    • If you are using any third-party plugins, please test them thoroughly before rolling 2.6 into production.


Responding to your feedback:
(green star) 5 new feature requests implemented
(green star) 275 votes satisfied
 
Highlights of this release:

Highlights of Confluence 2.6

Fresh look for the Default theme

  • Default font now Arial instead of Verdana.
  • Fresh, clean look and feel - these release notes are an example of the new style.
  • If you prefer the original Confluence look and feel, select the Confluence Classic Theme when creating a space.
  • Improved layouts for email and RSS feeds, helping you to skim-read and classify information quickly.
     

Personalised comments and Dashboard

  • In the new themes (Confluence Default and Clickr), comments now include the user's profile picture. (See screenshot above.)
  • 'Recently Updated' section on Dashboard includes profile picture and a summary of the change.
     

Space description on Dashboard

  • List of spaces on the Dashboard now includes a short description of the space.
     

Labels on templates

  • You can include labels when adding a page template.
  • New pages based on the template will automatically include the labels.
  • Read the documentation.
     

Default content for space home pages

  • Confluence site administrators can define default content for a space.
  • Home page for newly-added spaces will include the default content.
  • Read the documentation.
     

Social Bookmarking plugin now bundled with Confluence

  • Use Confluence to share bookmarks with your team.
  • Plugin will be enabled by default.
  • You can create a bookmark for any space in which you have 'create page' permission.
  • To view your bookmarks, go to the 'Bookmarks' tab under 'Browse Space'.
  • Drag the bookmarklet from the 'Bookmarks' tab onto your browser toolbar to create bookmarks any time.
  • Use the bookmarks macro to display a list of bookmarks anywhere in Confluence.
  • Subscribe to an RSS feed for your bookmarks.
  • Read the documentation.
     

Back-dating and renaming news items

  • Rename a news item at any time.
  • When creating a news item, you can now set the posting date to earlier than today.
  • Backdating is also supported by the RPC interface - useful for migrating blog posts from other systems.
     

Plus over 90 other fixes and improvements

  • MySQL 5.0 is officially supported, when used with Confluence 2.5 and above.
  • Images generated by macro plugins will now export to PDF, .doc and .html formats.
  • For plugin developers, the Joda-time library has been upgraded from 0.98 to 1.4 in Confluence 2.6. Plugins that use the date formatting or parsing functionality of Joda-time will need to be recompiled to work with Confluence 2.6.
  • Administrators can configure a non-standard port for the Confluence outgoing mail server. The host address can now be specified as hostname:port.
  • Improved user migration when integrating with LDAP: If you have existing Confluence users with the same usernames as LDAP users, you can now avoid duplicate users by configuring the LDAP repository before running the migration. The migration will then ignore users who have the same username as an LDAP user. Read the documentation.
  • And more.

Special thanks

We'd like to thank some of our valued community members whose contributions to the open source plugin library have made this version of Confluence even stronger:

The Confluence 2.6 team

Development
Paul Curren
Tom Davies
Matthew Jensen
Anatoli Kazatchkov
Samuel Le Berrigaud
David Loeng
Charles Miller
Christopher Owen
Agnes Ro
Matt Ryall
Don Willis

UI
Jason Taylor
Stephen Russell

Technical Writing
Rosie Jameson
Sarah Maddox

Oversight & Mismanagement
Mike Cannon-Brookes
Scott Farquhar
Soren Harner
Per Fragemann