Below are some important notes on upgrading to Confluence 4.3. For details of the new features and improvements in this release, please read the Confluence 4.3 Release Notes.

On this page:

Preparing your team for Confluence 4

If you are upgrading to Confluence 4 for the first time (coming from Confluence 3.5 or earlier) then please note that the change to the Confluence editing experience is significant. People in your organisation will need to be aware of the coming changes, so that they can plan and prepare for them. We have written some guides to help you:

Planning for Confluence 4

 

Upgrade notes

End of support for DB2 and PostgreSQL 8.2

As previously announced, from this release onwards we no longer offer support for the following database platforms:

Please see End of Support Announcements for Confluence.

Removal of JIRA Portlet macro

The JIRA Portlet macro is no longer supported. Gadgets replaced portlets in JIRA 4.0 and Confluence 3.1. We deprecated the use of JIRA portlets in Confluence 4.2 (see the Confluence 4.2 upgrade notes) and have removed the portlet code in Confluence 4.3. Pages that contain the macro will no longer display information drawn from JIRA. Instead, they will show an error reporting that the macro does not exist. To prevent this behaviour, please upgrade to a version of JIRA that supports gadgets, and follow the instructions in How to Migrate from JIRA Issues and JIRA Portlets to Gadgets.

Active Objects bundled

Confluence 4.3 ships with the Active Objects plugin. If you have previously installed Active Objects into your Confluence 4.2 site, you will need to uninstall it before upgrading to Confluence 4.2. This is because user-installed plugins override bundled plugins.

Migration of templates from wiki markup to the rich text format

As part of the Confluence upgrade, an automatic migration of your page templates will take place. This is a non-destructive process. Your existing content is not overwritten. Instead, the migration process will create a new version of each space template and each global template on your Confluence site. The new version will use the new XML storage format, so that you can edit the templates in the Confluence rich text editor.

This process is automatic, and you should not need to take any action. For more details about the upgrade process, see Migration of Templates from Wiki Markup to XHTML-Based Storage Format.

Advance notice: End of support for Java 6 in Confluence 5.0

We are planning to end support for Java 6 (JRE and JDK 1.6) in Confluence 5.0. See End of Support Announcements for Confluence.

Advance notice: End of support for Tomcat 5.5.x in Confluence 5.0

We are planning to end support for Tomcat 5.5.x in Confluence 5.0. See End of Support Announcements for Confluence.

Plain text emails no longer available

Emails are now only available in HTML format, which allows for the display of images and formatted content, such as changes made and the full content of the updated page or blog post.

Upgrade procedure

Note: Upgrade to a test environment first. Test your upgrades in your test environment before rolling them into production.

If you are already running a version of Confluence, please follow these instructions to upgrade to the latest version:

  1. Before you upgrade, we strongly recommend that you back up your Confluence Home Directory and database. See the documentation on backing up your Confluence site. If you are using an external database, perform a database backup.
  2. If your version of Confluence is earlier than 4.2, read the release notes and upgrade guides for all releases between your version and the latest version.
    In particular:
  3. Download the latest version of Confluence.
  4. Follow the instructions in the Upgrade Guide.

Checking for known issues and troubleshooting the Confluence upgrade