Release Notes 2.8-m7 ("Milestone 7")
Do not use this release to upgrade your production systems.
For all production use and testing of Confluence, please use the latest official release.
Confluence 2.8-m7 is a milestone development release for 2.8. This is a public development release (DR) leading up to Confluence 2.8. Development releases are a snapshot of our work in progress, allowing our customers and especially plugin-developers to see what we're up to.
Who should upgrade?
Development releases are not production ready. Development releases are snapshots of the ongoing Confluence development process. While we try to keep these releases stable, they have not undergone the same degree of testing as a full release, and could contain features that are incomplete or may change or be removed before the next full release.
No upgrade path. Because development releases represent work in progress, we cannot provide a supported upgrade path between development releases, or from any development release to a final release. You may not be able to migrate any data you store in a Confluence development release to a future Confluence release.
Atlassian does not provide support for development releases.
Our milestone releases aim to provide plugin developers with an opportunity to see the latest changes in the code.
Each milestone release has passed all our automatic tests, and has been used for one week on our official internal Confluence server. Most of the issues solved have been reviewed too.
However, since our milestones releases are timeboxed (i.e. they get released every two weeks, no matter how far we have come implementing features and bugfixes), there is always a chance that we have new known bugs, which are scheduled to be fixed in the next milestone, or completely new bugs unknown even to us.
Milestone releases may not have not been load- or stress-tested, or maybe they have but some performance problems still persist. So, for example, they might behave well on a small installation but show severe problems when subjected to many users.
Upgrade Procedure
Follow the normal upgrade instructions to upgrade from Confluence 2.7.x to this release. We strongly recommend that you backup your confluence-home directory and database before upgrading!
Downloads
All development releases are available from Development Releases on the Atlassian website.
Issues resolved or improved in this release
This page describes the changes you can expect from Confluence 2.8 Milestone 7. M7 is a "small" milestone that delivers some features that just didn't make it into M6, but which can't wait for M8 nor RCs either because we need your feedback as soon as possible!
End-user improvements
User Interface improvements:
- Matt Ryall's ShipIt project: improved comment threading, with dynamic collapsing
- Edit page title change
The title is not duplicated anymore, you simply edit the title directly
- Put PDF, Watch and Favorite icons on Tools menu
- Replace printable view with an improved print stylesheet for better printing directly from the page
- Improved editor caching
- Fixed editor layout bug in Safari
- Menus appear on hover
- Move command in Tools menu
Page Ordering:
- Included the page ordering tree into the edit-page, ironed out some bugs
Misc:
- Our student developer Chris Broadfoot added a few missing links into our user-management section, and incorporated a pretty slick way to change the size of the pagination window. Well done!
API changes
For plugins which configure Confluence's web interface, Condition implementations which depend on GlobalHelper are now deprecated, and should be converted to use the new WebInterfaceContext interface. The easiest way for most plugins to do this is to extend BaseConfluenceCondition rather than the now-deprecated AbstractConfluenceCondition. (Javadoc links to come once this is published.)
Known problems
- We found a severe performance problem during our loadtests. Confluence works exactly like before under low load, but once you go above a request per second you will notice a much higher load than acceptable. We will fix that for the final release.
- Upgrade issue for clustered deployments. Don't use this Milestone on a Cluster.
- a few glitches when viewing with IE6&7, and when using the new page tree in a browser without FireBug installed.
Outlook
We are in bugfix-mode now. While a few icons and CSS-styles will still change, the main priority is now to iron out all our bugs during the next two weeks.