Below are some important notes on upgrading to Confluence 4.0. For details of the new features and improvements in this release, please read the Confluence 4.0 Release Notes.

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Upgrade Notes

Content updates after upgrade

You will notice once you upgrade to Confluence 4.0, every page will have been edited during the migration process. This manifests itself in the appearance of changes to every page's content by various different users. When migrating pages, Confluence will show the same username that last contributed to your content as the author of the change. This is the upgrade task of migrating your wiki page storage format to XHTML from Wiki Markup. Do not be alarmed by this. This will only happen once for all current versions of content. This will not trigger email notifications, but will update your RSS feeds. Where possible, a change comment of "Upgraded to Confluence 4" will be added to pages and blog posts.

User macros migration

After upgrading, user macros will not be able to be inserted until they have defined macro parameters. See Guide to User Macro Templates. Defining macro parameters will mean that they can once again insert these user macros.

Email notifications

With the update of the email templates, the textual content of the notifications has also changed. These wording changes may invalidate any email filters set up to label or organise your email notifications.

Plugins may not be compatible with Confluence 4.0

To check your plugins are compatible with Confluence 4.0, see the Universal Plugin Manager (UPM) under Confluence Admin > Plugins > Confluence Upgrade Check. Here, you can select the new version of Confluence and see whether your existing plugins are compatible. If your custom plugins are not working following the upgrade to Confluence 4.0, see the Plugin Development Upgrade FAQ for 4.0 for guidance on how to solve this issue.

Functionality removed: converting a Global Space to a Personal Space

Confluence 4.0 does not offer the ability to convert a global space to a personal space. Our research has shown that this feature is not used much. We have decided to remove it as part of our ongoing mission to simplify Confluence where possible. We deprecated this functionality in the Confluence 3.5 Upgrade Notes.

Functionality removed: editing a Confluence page in an Office application

After extensive usability testing, we are confident the new Confluence 4.0 editor will be easier to learn and more reliable to use than the previous editor. Therefore this feature is no longer required. Other functions of the Office Connector (e.g. "Edit Attachments in Office") remain.

Functionality removed: linking to comments using commentid

Confluence 4.0 does not allow linking to comments by comment ID. Users will now have to use the permalink URL to link to comments. This will primarily affect plugin developers.

Functionality removed: Mail Page plugin

The Mail Page plugin is no longer bundled in Confluence. With the introduction of the "Share Page" feature, this is no longer needed.

Functionality removed: Social Bookmarking plugin

The Social Bookmarking plugin is no longer bundled with Confluence as of the 4.0 release. Our research has shown that this feature is not used much. If you are currently using this plugin, you will need to reinstall it from plugins.atlassian.com. Atlassian continues to fully support this plugin.

Drag-and-drop in Internet Explorer 9

Internet Explorer 9 does not support the drag-and-drop functionality of HTML5. This means that when using IE9, you will not be able to use the attachments drag-and-drop feature in Confluence 4.0.

Various admin settings removed

In Confluence 4.0, rarely used admin settings have been taken out. These are as follows:

Confluence Clustered delayed

Please be aware that Confluence Clustered is not available for version 4.0 yet. It will be forthcoming in a minor release, following the launch of version 4.0.

(i) These are probably rolled into 4.1:
* The *WebDAV Attachment Storage Location* has been removed,
* *Show Link Icons* general configuration setting has been removed,
* The *Enable Confluence Open Search* option,
* The *External User Management* Security Configuration setting has been removed,
* The JIRA Portlet Macro has been disabled or removed.

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

As always, please test your upgrades in your test environment before rolling 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 3.5.x, then you should  upgrade to Confluence 3.5.x before upgrading to Confluence 4.0. There are several reasons for this:If you are upgrading from 2.1 or earlier, please read the 2.2 Release Notes.
    If you are upgrading from 2.2 or earlier, you will need to upgrade to Confluence 2.7.x first, confirm the upgrade was successful, then upgrade from version 2.7.x to version 3.5.x, before upgrading to the latest version. For more details, please refer to CONF-11767.
    If your site contains links to a file system (for example [\\\C:\Foo\Bar\foobarpreso.ppt] these may break when upgrading to Confluence 4.0.x.  We recommend that you upgrade directly to Confluence 5.0.3. Refer to  for more details. 
  3. Download the latest version of Confluence.
  4. Follow the instructions in the Upgrade Guide.

Checking for Other Known Issues and Troubleshooting the Confluence Upgrade

RELATED TOPICS

Confluence 4.0 Release Notes