Confluence : Release Notes 2.0
This page last changed on Jun 29, 2006 by david.soul@atlassian.com.
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 ContentsUpgrading From a Previous Version of ConfluenceUpgrading Confluence should be pretty easy: you can find instructions here. We strongly recommend that you backup your confluence.home directory and database before upgrading!
Important Migration Notes
Upgrading from 1.4.4After 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 EarlierUsers upgrading from an earlier version of Confluence should check the release-notes of the other major Confluence releases: New FeaturesThe four major new features in Confluence 2.0 are:
..but there's a lot more on top of that. Rich Text Editing
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:
LabelsAnother 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.
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:
Dashboard FeaturesThe 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):
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* ![]() 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 BuilderConfluence 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
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.
Other New FeaturesRecord "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:
The Chart Macro is now shipped with Confluence, allowing you to dynamically generate neat looking charts like this:
Improved Gallery Macro The gallery macro has been spruced up, and now has a slideshow view:
Additions to the Remote API Additions to the Confluence Remote API include:
Notable Bug FixesWe 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 BugsSome bugs were introduced during the Confluence 2.0 development cycle that we could not fix in time for the final release. Of note are:
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
Well that's all folks - if you're still reading - thank you for getting this far!
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Document generated by Confluence on Mar 22, 2007 20:57 |