Confluence Docs 3.0 : Release Notes 2.0 This page last changed on Jul 05, 2009 by ggaskell. Atlassian Software is proud to present Confluence 2.0 (otherwise known as Yarra). Yarra is the result of five months of solid work by the Confluence team, and we're really glad to be able, finally, to share it with the world. Existing customers who wish to upgrade, or new users who wish to try out Confluence for 30 days, can download Confluence from the Atlassian website: http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence Yarra is the fifth major update to Confluence. Among the improvements in Confluence 2.0 are an easy-to-use WYSIWYG editor for writing pages, labels for categorising them, and a powerful RSS builder for keeping track of what's new. Confluence 2.0 is a free upgrade for any customer who purchased their Confluence license after November 16th, 2004. If the maintenance period of your license has expired, or is about to expire, why not contact our friendly sales staff and get it renewed? It's the only way to keep up with all the great new features we're adding. A big thanks to everyone who reported bugs and offered suggestions over the last few months, especially everyone who helped by trying out our Development Releases. Also, congratulations to the Socceroos for getting Australia into the World Cup for the first time in 32 years. It almost makes up for losing the Ashes. See also: Issues Resolved for 2.0 ### Contents Upgrading Migration New Features Notable Bug Fixes Outstanding Bugs ### Upgrading From a Previous Version of Confluence Upgrading Confluence should be pretty easy. We strongly recommend that you backup your confluence.home directory and database before upgrading!
| Upgrades from 1.4.2 and earlier If you are upgrading from Confluence 1.4.2 or earlier, you may experience problems with some space-related functionality (see CONF-4765), such as adding a space as a favourite. To work around this, please restart the Confluence instance after the upgrade. This will be fixed in Confluence 2.0.2.
### Important Migration Notes
| Macro/Plugin Compatibility Necessary changes were made to the Confluence rendering subsystem during the development of Confluence 2.0 that may render some third-party plugins (especially macros) inoperable. If you upgrade Confluence and find that macros or plugins are not operating correctly, try removing all files from `[confluence-home]/plugins` and restarting Confluence.
| HSQL 1.8 Upgrade If you are using the embedded HSQL database, it is possible that Confluence will not be able to automatically upgrade your data. If this happens, Confluence 2.0 will refuse to start, and you will be directed to the following Confluence page which contains instructions on how to upgrade the database manually: Upgrading From HSQL 1.7.1 to 1.8
| SSO update If you are using some third-party Seraph authenticator with Confluence, or have written your own, you should read CONF-4581 before upgrading. Confluence now uses the Seraph defined login.link.url property to define its login link urls, which may cause issues with authenticators that relied on Confluence's previous, incorrect behaviour.
| Weblogic Performance Confluence 2.0 may perform very badly under Weblogic. There is a workaround for this problem described in CONF-4634, and a full fix IS included in 2.0.1.
| JDK 1.5 If you are running Confluence 2.0 on the JDK 1.5, you will need to download some additional dependencies as described in CONF-4643. A full fix is included in a 2.0.1.
| MySQL 5 If you are running Confluence 2.0 on the MySQL 5 database, you may encounter some problems. One fix is described here.
#### Upgrading from 1.4.4 After upgrading to 2.0, administrators will need to rebuild the site's search-index to ensure all the new search features are enabled. Do this from the Content Indexing section of the global administration menu. #### Upgrading from 1.3.5 or Earlier Users upgrading from an earlier version of Confluence should check the release-notes of the other major Confluence releases: Release Notes 1.4 Release Notes 1.3 Release Notes 1.2 Release Notes 1.1 ### New Features The four major new features in Confluence 2.0 are: Rich Text Editing Labels for content New Dashboard Features for managing sites with large numbers of spaces. A dynamic RSS Builder ..but there's a lot more on top of that. #### Rich Text Editing
| Browser Compatibility The Confluence Rich Text editor is currently only compatible with Internet Explorer 6 on Windows, plus Mozilla and Firefox across platforms. Javascript must be enabled in the browser for the editor to function. Support for Safari under Mac OS X is currently not available. To track Safari compatibility, please follow this JIRA issue: CONF-3864
It almost goes without saying that the most highly requested feature in Confluence has been the ability to create pages without having to learn wiki markup. We're glad we can finally offer a powerful "what you see is (pretty much) what you get" rich text editor built into Confluence, making it easier for anyone to contribute to the site. The WYSIWYG editor is enabled when you install or upgrade to Confluence 2.0. Global Administrators can disable the editor if they want to stick with pure wiki markup, and can also choose which editor users should be presented with by default. (The setting is under "General Configuration" in the administrative console). Users can also choose which editor they prefer simply by clicking on the "Make this my default editor" link that appears on the edit screen. For the "feature mad" amongst us, here are some neat things you can do with the WYSIWYG editor: Full screen view - really useful for editing large pages. Click Cannot resolve external resource into attachment. in the menu bar. Quickly switch between WYSIWYG and Wiki markup without a page refresh Change the size of your editing window to suit your browser. Your size preference is remembered across sessions. To change it, drag the handle in the bottom right hand corner of the editor. Undo and redo! #### Labels Another highly requested feature was the ability to categorise content within Confluence beyond the rigid heirarchy allowed by spaces and parent-child relationships between pages. To this end we have introduced labels: simple one-word 'tags' that can be added to any page or blog-post the user has permission to edit. Labels can be used to categorise content, bookmark it, flag it for attention, or anything else you can think of.
| A Tag By Any Other Name Picking a name for labels wasn't easy. Google's GMail service calls them labels, while other collaborative categorisation systems such as del.icio.us and Flickr call them tags. We decided that 'label' was a more natural description. For more information about our choice, see Labels vs Keywordson our new Developer Blog and for more on the overall philosophy behind labels and tags, check out the Folksonomy page on Wikipedia.
Labels can be added to any page from the edit screen, or through a dynamic interface right when you're viewing a page. Once a page is labeled, then clicking on the label's name allows you to browse other pages with the same label, or view related labels that commonly occur on the same pages. You can also view the space's most popular labels from the space browser, to get an idea of the most popular topics within the space. Personal Labels If you prepend `my:` to a label (for example, `my:todo` or `my:favourite`, then the label is a personal label - only visible to you. Personal labels allow you to tag content for your own purposes: for example to keep track of pages you feel need your attention, or that contain information you refer to frequently. You can browse your personal labels from your user profile. Any user can add their personal labels to any page, even when they don't have editing permission. Favourites Favourites are a special personal label: `my:favourite` or `my:favorite`. Whenever you see the Cannot resolve external resource into attachment. icon, it means you can label this content as being your favourite, and whenever you see the Cannot resolve external resource into attachment. icon, it means that the content is currently in your list of favourites. You can view your favourites from the Labels tab of your user profile, or keep track of them on your dashboard. Label-Aware Macros Many existing macros have been improved to allow you to filter content based on labels: including the {recent-pages}, {recently-updated} and {blog-posts} macros. We've also added macros that provide more information about labels and labelled content: {related-labels} gives a list of labels that might be related to a page {listlabels} lists all the labels in a space {contentbylabel} lists content that has a particular label {recently-used-labels} lists labels that have been recently added or applied {navmap} draws a nice-looking table of links to pages with a particular label #### Dashboard Features The Confluence dashboard has been improved to make it easier for you to keep track of only those spaces you are interested in: a big improvement for Confluence sites with large numbers of spaces. The list of spaces is now divided into four tabs (although all four may not be visible): All shows you all spaces My shows you all spaces you have marked as your favourites (you can mark a space as your favourite from the All tab by clicking on the Cannot resolve external resource into attachment. icon) Team shows you all the available 'teams', and the spaces that have been assigned to them New shows you any space that has been added in the last week The recently updated content list on the dashboard will reflect the spaces in your chosen tab. So if you're looking at the My tab, the dashboard will only be showing you the recent updates in your favourite spaces. *Teams*!dashboard-team-tab.png|align=center! Teams are a simple, and very wiki-like way to group spaces together. Space administrators can add "team labels" to a space, which are then used to group those spaces under the team tab on the dashboard. So if your wiki has 100 spaces, but only five of them are of any interest to your sales team, just add a "sales" team label to those five spaces. That will group those spaces together on the dashboard under the 'team' tab, and your sales team need never look at the other 95 spaces. #### RSS Builder Confluence has always provided a brace of useful RSS feeds, but the problem is that for every feed we provided, users asked for half a dozen more. The obvious answer is to let users build RSS feeds based on their own chosen criteria. You can access the RSS builder from the Confluence dashboard Once in the builder, you can choose Which spaces to include in the feed Which types of content should be tracked Which labels, if any, you are interested in How many items to include in the feed Whether you want a single RSS entry per page or one for each time the page is edited Whether you want an RSS 2.0 or Atom 0.3 feed Whether Confluence should require authentication to view the feed Once you have decided what you want, Confluence will give you a URL to paste into your RSS reader. These URLs can be shared with other Confluence users, although they will only ever be allowed to see content that they have permission to view. If you have asked to authenticate, Confluence will require HTTP Basic Authentication, which is supported by most RSS readers. We've also taken the opportunity to improve the presentation of our RSS feeds - including a lot more information in each feed so you can follow your Confluence site entirely from your newsreader.
| The Atom Working Group has blessed the final Atom 1.0 standard, and are recommending that all applications remove support for Atom 0.3. However, as of the release of Confluence 2.0, there is no stable Atom 1.0 library from which we could generate feeds. In some future release of Confluence, Atom 0.3 support will be removed in favour of Atom 1.0.
#### Other New Features Record "Change Comments" When Editing a Page There is now a field on the edit screen for recording a "change comment" when you edit a page. These comments are stored in the page history, and can be used to keep a more complete history of why a page has been edited. Embed Flash and Movies You can now embed Flash content or movies (Quicktime or Windows Media) into a page as easily as you can an image: just attach the Flash or movie file to the page, then include it as you would include an image (!filename.mov!). Export Pages as Word Documents You can now export pages straight into Word from the Info tab. This is extremely useful for emailing around content to non-Confluence users, printing a document or just creating a backup in Word. Copy Pages Also on the Info tab is a "Copy" link that allows you to clone a page in a single click - including making copies of any attachments. Improved Search Interface Results returned from Confluence's search engine now have: Improved contextual results, showing the most important text around where your query was matched in the page Contextual results for any attachment: see where a search was matched even inside PDF, Word, PowerPoint or Excel documents! Search results for attachments give you more (and clearer) information about what the attachment is, and where it's from!search-result-fragments.png|align=center! Chart Plugin The Chart Macro is now shipped with Confluence, allowing you to dynamically generate neat looking charts like this:
| Wiki Source
    {chart:title=Fish Sold|type=bar|width=400|height=350|legend=true}
    || Fish Type || 2004 || 2005 ||
    || Herring | 9,500 | 8,300 |
    || Salmon | 2,900 | 4,200 |
    || Tuna | 1,500 | 1,500 |
    {chart}
Improved Gallery Macro The gallery macro has been spruced up, and now has a slideshow view:
#### Confluence 2.0 Screenshots
My personal labels! Only for me! | Popular labels for a given space. | Alphabetically organised labels for a given space.
Some release notes exported to Word (even on a Mac!) - great for printing too. | The new Dashboard space tabs, here showing the "jira" team tab and one favourite space. | A very basic (quite boring - sorry, it's late) example of change summaries.
Screenshot of the new 2.0 rich text editor | Improved search showing fragments from attachments, file sizes and types. | The new RSS builder lets you construct RSS feeds of exactly the content you want.
View page label interface showing autocomplete. |  |
- Additions to the Remote API Additions to the Confluence Remote API include: Comment manipulation Label manipulation Attachment uploading and editing Improved user- and permissions management
  | Confluence now uses version 2.0 of the Apache XML-RPC library. Java XML-RPC clients using earlier versions of the Apache XML-RPC libraries (i.e. 1.3 or earlier) may experience problems with responses containing non-ASCII data.
Also... You can download all the attachments on a page in a single zip-file Import and restore now have progress indicators Backup and restore use significantly less memory The embedded database has been upgraded to HSQL 1.8, which should be significantly more reliable Collapsed breadcrumbs now expand with a single mouse click ### Notable Bug Fixes We resolved a lot of issues between Confluence 1.4.4 and Confluence 2.0. The best way to see what we've fixed is to ask JIRA, the world's best issue-tracker: Issues Resolved for 2.0 ### Outstanding Bugs Some bugs were introduced during the Confluence 2.0 development cycle that we could not fix in time for the final release. Of note are: Some pernicious Javascript errors when changing styles in the rich text editor under Internet Explorer The rich text editor may not perfectly handle complex pages with structural macros Attachments containing high-bit characters in their filenames may not be correctly retrieved by Confluence Once again, if you find any bugs in Confluence, or have any feature suggestions, you can report them online in JIRA. ### The Confluence 2.0 Team
Development Tom Davies Jeremy Higgs David Loeng Charles Miller Daniel Ostermeier Jens Schumacher | Documentation Vidya Madabushi Oversight & Mis management Mike Cannon-Brookes Scott Farquhar Nerf Target-Practice Nick Faiz
Well that's all folks - if you're still reading - thank you for getting this far!
| To keep up with all the latest developments in the next 2.1 release (codenamed: Bogan) - subscribe to our developer blog.
Attachments: labels-heatmap.png (image/png) labels-alphabetized.png (image/png) export-to-word.png (image/png) dashboard-team-tab.png (image/png) change-summaries.png (image/png) wysiwyg-editor.png (image/png) search-result-fragments.png (image/png) rss-builder-screenshot.png (image/png) labels-with-autocomplete.png (image/png) labels-personal.png (image/png)

Document generated by Confluence on Nov 05, 2009 23:32