Release Notes 2.9-m5 ("Milestone 5")
Do not use this release to upgrade your production systems.
For all production use and testing of Confluence, please use the latest official release.
This release is a milestone development release for 2.9. This is a public development release (DR) leading up to Confluence 2.9. 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, and usually milestone releases even have been load- and performance-tested for a while.
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.
Additionally, our performance-testing and compatibility testing for databases and application servers is not done to the full extent. So, for example, a milestone release 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 2.8.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
We are rapidly approaching the end of the 2.9 release cycle. There will be a really small M6 later this week, and then that's it, we are going into bugfix and compatibility-testing mode, so we can release on the 29th of July.
Plugins
We have done a significant amount of work in the area of plugin loading (and the plugin classloaders) to improve performance. There are no API changes, but it is very possible that these changes may expose bugs. While we tried to remain backwards compatible, it is crucial that you test for compatibility of your plugins.
Editor
The preview in the editor is now capable of rendering content exactly as it appears on the page. However, to do this, we have had to disable interaction with the preview. You will no longer be able to follow links or interact with the preview in any other way.
When drafts are saved automatically to the server, this will be shown to you at the top of the editor.
Engine room
Whisper the words "Action class hierarchy" anywhere close to a Confluence developer and he or she will cringe. Not anymore as of this Milestone. Plenty of inheritance trees have been cut, and miraculously Confluence still works. This will enable us to work faster and more efficiently in the future.
Page tree and UI
We had a few nasty UI bugs recently where plugin JavaScript code would interfere with our menus and other JavaScript code, and we had a few Pagetree bugs. The most important ones have been fixed in this release.
Discovery Team
Author auto-complete field added to the search result screen to allow filtering searches by contributor (author or editor).
The 'new search' (or reset search) link on the search screen filter left the building somewhere around milestone 3. This has now been re-instated.
A couple of 2.9 specific bug fixes are also included.
Known problems
Several small bugs, specifically around the new author-search.