Release Notes 1.3-DR4
Confluence 1.3-DR4 is the fourth development release in the cycle leading up to Confluence 1.3. We're on the home stretch! The final, stable 1.3 isn't far away.
Confluence 1.3-DR4 includes a raft of improvements to mail archiving, a redesigned setup wizard, significant improvements to the way we back up and restore your system configuration, and a truck-load of bug fixes.
Who should upgrade?
Development releases are snapshots of the ongoing Confluence development process. We make them available for customers who are willing to risk an unpolished release in order to have early access to new features.
If you want to be running the most stable and most reliable version of Confluence, you should stick with the official, numbered releases.
Upgrade Procedure
Upgrading Confluence should be pretty easy. If you are upgrading from Confluence 1.2 or higher, you can find instructions here. We strongly recommend that you backup your confluence.home directory and database before upgrading!
If you are upgrading from Confluence 1.1.2 or earlier, be sure to read the upgrade instructions in the Confluence 1.2 release notes.
Note: You will need to rebuild the search index after you upgrade for certain features (including mail threading) to work properly.
New Features in Confluence 1.3-DR4
Setup Improvements
Confluence's setup wizard was badly in need of an overhaul, so that's exactly what we've done. Among the improvements, we have:
- Improved the ordering of steps. For example, if you are importing straight from a backup, you no longer need a redundant administrative user.
- Added a quick, two-step setup process to get Confluence running straight away
- Made the database setup much more robust, and much better at reporting errors
- Removed those steps that weren't really necessary to get Confluence running
Hopefully this will make it a lot easier to get Confluence up and running, or show off Confluence to your friends and family.
Mail Archive Improvements
We've been working hard to build on the basic mail-archiving features included in 1.3-DR3. Included in the new version are:
- Improved indexing of mail senders, message-ids and subjects
- Improved integration of mail with search
- The ability to delete mail (if you have been assigned the delete mail permission)
- Direct access to mail archives from the dashboard
- Display of mail attachments in the "view mail" page
- The ability to link to a single message by its internal Confluence ID ( [\$1234] will link to message 1234)
- The ability to navigate forward and back through mails chronologically
- Email addresses are displayed or masked in accordance with your global preferences
We still have a few things to do (date based views, a calendar), but the mail archive is now very useable. Especially when you take into account...
Mail Threading
Of course, it's important for your mail archive to be able to represent conversation threads. How you present threads, though, is just as important.
Here's how most mail-based web archives present your thread at the bottom of each message:
Not very helpful, is it. Here's how that same bottom-of-the-message view looks in Confluence:
At a glance, you can see exactly where the message sits in a conversation.
Backup Improvements
(Release Notes 1.3-DR4 and Release Notes 1.3-DR4)
Confluence 1.3-DR4 contains two significant improvements to backing up and restoring the system.
- You can now exclude attached files from your backups. Of course, this means you have to back up your attachment directory separately, but if you already have a good backup regime for your filesystem (and can thus restore the attached files separately), it means that your Confluence data backups will take up far less room.
- We now include important parts system configuration in your backups. this means that color-schemes and plugin preferences are now saved, and fixes a large number of issues that users have filed due to the restore process not bringing the system back up in the same state as when they saved it.
Library Upgrades
We have continued the process of upgrading to the most recent stable versions of those libraries Confluence is built on, which should result in improved stability and performance.
Bugs fixed for 1.3-DR4
We've also fixed a lot of bugs, as we ramp up for the stable 1.3 release. Take a look in JIRA for the full list.