Release Notes for XWiki 8.3 Milestone 1

Last modified by Vincent Massol on 2016/09/28

This is the release notes for XWiki Commons, XWiki Rendering, XWiki Platform and XWiki Enterprise. They share the same release notes as they are released together and have the same version.

This release brings mostly usability improvements:

  • You now have the ability to export children pages along with the current one in XAR and HTML formats. 
  • Ratings and active install numbers are now displayed in the Livetable on the home page of the Extension Repository Application. 
  • You can easily use a color theme from the main wiki in other subwikis.
  • New hints are displayed in the user profile preferences. 
  • Some page suggestions are displayed when you try to reach a page or an attachment that do not exist.

In addition, more than 35 bugs have been fixed!

New and Noteworthy (since XWiki 8.2)

Full list of issues fixed and Dashboard for 8.3.

For Users

XAR Children Export

 
It's now possible, for HTML and XAR formats, to export selected children along with the current page.

Children Macro

 
A new {{children/}} macro has been added to display a tree view of all children of the current page.

Active Installs for Extensions

 
The number of active installs is displayed for each extension in the Repository App's home page livetable and in the extension page.

Ratings on Extensions Repository home page

 
Rating is now displayed in the Repository App's home page livetable.

Not Found Suggestions

 
We have added suggestions for the "document not found" and "attachment not found" error screens. The suggestions address minor typos and misspelling (including lower case vs upper case), but also bad location requests.

User Profile Preference Hints

 
We have added documentation hints for User Profile Preferences so that it's more obvious to understand what each option means.

 
The Blog Category Panel now has an entry for All blog posts with a RSS feed for all.

Miscellaneous

For Admins

Global Color Themes

 
It's now possible, on a subwiki, to use a color theme coming from the main wiki (global themes).

Miscellaneous

  • Active installs client now send the memory used by the instance.

  • Debian packages now override standard configuration files handling for xwiki.cfg, xwiki.properties and web.xml to provide 3 ways merge with standard dpkg and apt command line tools.

For Developers

Velocity and ScriptContext synchronization

 
VelocityContext and ScriptContext are now fully in sync (and if you find a use case where it's not true create a BUG on  https://jira.xwiki.org) and VelocityContext is now close to internal detail. This allows for example defining a variable in Velocity and accessing it from a Groovy script:

{{velocity}}
## Setting some script binding in Velocity
#set($myvar = "toto")
{{/velocity}}

{{groovy}}
// Lets use the script binding that has been set in previous script
print myvar
{{/groovy}}

More details

Miscellaneous

Moved Modules

  • Cache module has been moved to XWiki Commons. This mostly means that you can now use it in commons and rendering modules. Nothing change in the classes or packages names, just need to update group id and artifact id in your build tool.
  • Application Manager moved to Contrib (https://github.com/xwiki-contrib/xwiki-platform-application-manager), it can still be installed as extension if required

Upgrades

The following dependencies have been upgraded:

Translations

The following translations have been updated: 

Tested Browsers & Databases

Here is the list of browsers we support and how they have been tested for this release:

BrowserTest Result
Chrome30.pngGoogle ChromeNot Tested
Firefox30.pngMozilla FirefoxNot Tested
IE30.pngInternet Explorer 10Not Tested
IE30.pngInternet Explorer 11Jira Tickets Marked as Fixed in the Release Notes + New and Noteworthy Features

Here is the list of databases we support and how they have been tested for this release:

DatabaseTest Result
hypersql.pngHyperSQL 2.3.4Jira Tickets Marked as Fixed in the Release Notes + New and Noteworthy Features
mysql.pngMySQL 5.7.13Jira Tickets Marked as Fixed in the Release Notes + New and Noteworthy Features
oracle.pngOracleNot Tested
postgresql.pngPostgreSQLNot Tested

All the tests have passed except for which has been reopened as .

Known issues

Backward Compatibility and Migration Notes

General Notes

When upgrading make sure you compare your xwiki.cfg, xwiki.properties and web.xml files with the newest version since some configuration parameters may have been modified or added. Note that you should add xwiki.store.migration=1 so that XWiki will attempt to automatically migrate your current database to the new schema. Make sure you backup your Database before doing anything.

Issues specific to XWiki 8.3 Milestone 1

LDAP Module moved to Contrib

The module containing among other things the standard LDAP authenticator has been moved to http://github.com/xwiki-contrib/ldap and is not embedded anymore in XE. Starting with 8.3M1 you need to install it if you want to use it. See http://extensions.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Extension/LDAP/#H8.3.x for more details on what between the XWiki Platform module and the new Contrib Extension.

Cache module moved to XWiki Commons

The only thing that changed is the id of the modules. If you have any dependency on those you just need to change org.xwiki.platform:xwiki-platform-* to org.xwiki.commons:xwiki-commons-*

API Breakages

No API has been broken since XWiki 8.2.1!

Credits

The following people have contributed code to this release (sorted alphabetically):

  • Alexandru Cotiuga
  • Denis Gervalle
  • Ecaterina Moraru (Valica)
  • Eduard Moraru
  • Guillaume Delhumeau
  • Lukas Krejci
  • Manuel Smeria
  • Marius Dumitru Florea
  • Sergiu Dumitriu
  • Thomas Mortagne
  • Vincent Massol
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