Below are some important notes on upgrading to Confluence 4.2. For details of the new features and improvements in this release, please read the Confluence 4.2 Release Notes.

On this page:

Upgrade Notes

Checking for compatible plugins before upgrading

Before upgrading to Confluence 4.2, please consider the plugins that are essential for your installation, and use the plugin upgrade check to see whether there is a compatible version of those plugins available for Confluence 4.2.

In particular, the implementation of quick comments required some significant changes to the editor’s initialization code. This will have consequences for some Confluence plugins. Details are in this blog post: JavaScript Changes Required for Confluence 4.2 Compatibility.

Disabling notification of signups

This release includes an automatic notification, sent by email to all administrators, each time someone signs up to the Confluence site. This notification is part of the feature that allows you to invite people to sign up via a URL, and to set your signup mode to public or private. See the documentation.

The notification is enabled by default on the first upgrade to Confluence 4.1.9 or later.  If you are upgrading to Confluence 4.2 from Confluence 4.1.7 or earlier, you may want to disable the notification after upgrading, especially if you allow public signup and are expecting a large number of signups.

To disable the notification:

The email notification includes a link to change notification settings. Alternatively, follow these steps:

1. Click Add Users on the dashboard.
   Or take the longer route: Select Administration menu , then select General Configuration Click Users > Add User.
2. Remove the tick from Notify administrators when users sign up.

Configuring the Recommended Updates notification

Confluence now sends a regular email report to subscribers, containing the top content that is relevant to the person receiving the message. By default Confluence will send a weekly update to all users, except under these conditions:

• If you have public signup enabled, the Recommended Updates email notification is turned off by default.
• If you are connected to LDAP and a user has never logged in to Confluence, that user will not receive the Recommended Updates notification.
  Due to a bug in Confluence 4.2, 4.2.1 and 4.2.2, the Recommended Updates email notification may be sent to all LDAP Confluence users, whether they have logged in or not. The problem is tracked on this issue: CONF-25213 - Getting issue details... STATUS The problem will be fixed in Confluence 4.2.3. Until then, you may wish to disable the notification as described in the next paragraph, if your Confluence site is connected to a large LDAP user base.

You can turn off the Recommended Updates notification, or change its settings for the site. See Configuring the Recommended Updates Email Notification. Confluence users can choose their personal settings, which will override the defaults. See Email Notifications.

Disabling the new 'Popular' tab on the dashboard

In some environments, you may prefer not to display the new 'Popular' tab on the dashboard. For example, if your wiki allows only a small group of people to log in and contribute content or comments. Then the tab may not be relevant to you.

To prevent the tab from appearing, you can disable the relevant plugin module. You need System Administrator permissions to do this. Go to the Dashboard Macros plugin (see Configuring apps ), click Manage plugin modules and disable the Popular Tab module.

Advance notice: End of support for DB2 in Confluence 4.3

We are planning to end support for DB2 in Confluence 4.3. See End of Support Announcements for Confluence.

Advance notice: Removal of JIRA Portlet macro in Confluence 4.3

The JIRA Portlet macro, for JIRA 3.x and earlier, allows you to display a JIRA dashboard portlet on a Confluence page. Gadgets replaced portlets in JIRA 4.0 and Confluence 3.1.

In Confluence 4.1 and 4.2, it is no longer possible to add a JIRA Portlet macro via the Confluence macro browser. It is still possible to add the macro using wiki markup or by copying an existing JIRA Portlet macro. The macro still displays information correctly.

In Confluence 4.3, we will remove the JIRA Portlet macro from Confluence. 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 behavior, 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.

Advance notice: End of support for PostgreSQL 8.2 in Confluence 4.3

Update added on 1 May 2012: We are planning to end support for version 8.2 of PostgreSQL in Confluence 4.3. 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

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 and other important directories 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, then you must upgrade to Confluence 3.5.x before upgrading to Confluence 4.x. There are several reasons for this:
   
   • There were major changes to user management and LDAP in Confluence 3.5.
   • From version 3.5, you will be able to use our new automated installer / upgrader to move to 4.0. The Confluence 4.0 installer does not support upgrading from Confluence versions earlier than 3.5.
   • We recommend that you fix any issues arising from the upgrade to version 3.5.x, separately from those that may arise from upgrading to version 4.x. Please contact Atlassian Support for assistance.
   • Please read the Upgrade Notes Overview and the upgrade notes for each version of Confluence listed on that page. (There are hyperlinks to each one.)
   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, then upgrade 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 4.2.x.  We recommend that you upgrade directly to Confluence 5.0.3. Refer to  CONF-23575 - Getting issue details... STATUS  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

After you have completed the steps required to upgrade your Confluence installation, check all the items on the Confluence post-upgrade checklist to ensure that everything works as expected. If something is not working correctly, please check for known Confluence issues and try troubleshooting your upgrade as described below:

• Check for known issues. Sometimes we find out about a problem with the latest version of Confluence after we have released the software. In such cases we publish information about the known issues in the Confluence Knowledge Base.
• Check for answers from the community. Other users may have encountered the same issue. You can check for answers from the community at Atlassian Community.
• Did you encounter a problem during the Confluence upgrade? Please refer to the guide to troubleshooting upgrades in the Confluence Knowledge Base.

• If you encounter a problem during the upgrade and cannot solve it, please create a support ticket and one of our support engineers will help you.