Release Notes for XWiki Enterprise 3.4

Version 4.1 by Marius Dumitru Florea on 2012/01/24

XWiki Enterprise 3.4 is a stabilization release as we're approaching the end of the 3.x cycle so its main goal was to improve the Extension Manager and App Within Minutes features. However, this release also comes with a new look and a new default wiki page syntax.

New and Noteworthy (since XWiki Enterprise 3.3 version)

Checkout the full unabridged list of issues fixed in this release and, if you're interested in statistics, the JIRA dashboard.

New color themes

XWiki Enterprise 3.4 comes with a new default color theme and other three (Mint, Ruby and Dusk) that you can choose from. All four use CSS3 rules and new color variables in order to be able to have gradients. All color themes that were previously available are now considered deprecated and have been published as extensions: Default, Bordo, Nature, BlueSky, Inner Dark, Nightfall and Peach.

This means that custom build color themes or skins build on top of Colibri may not be compatible with the recent changes when doing an upgrade.

In order to solve this problem you have two solutions: adjust your custom color themes with the new changes or don't upgrade the following wiki pages when upgrading the XAR: ColorThemes.DefaultColorTheme and XWiki.AdminSheet and the following CSS files from Colibri skin: colibri.css and ie-all.css.

colorthemes34.png

XWiki Syntax 2.1 is the default page syntax

Even though the XWiki Syntax 2.1 has been available for a long time already, it was marked experimental. We've now made it final which means no more changes will be brought to the XWiki Syntax 2.1 (any new change will be made in a new XWiki Syntax 2.2).

What it also means is that when you create a new page from now on, it'll be created in XWiki Syntax 2.1 syntax by default (you can still choose another syntax using the Syntax chooser in edit mode, see Page Editing).

As a reminder here are below the differences between XWiki Syntax 2.0 and XWiki Syntax 2.1.

Changes to the link syntax from XWiki Syntax 2.0

The query string and the anchor (URL fragment) are no longer specified in the reference section of the link syntax:

[[Link Specification>>platform:Main.XWikiSyntax||queryString="foo=bar" anchor="HXWikiSyntax2.1LinkSpecification"]]

links to:

http://platform.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/XWikiSyntax?foo=bar#HXWikiSyntax2.1LinkSpecification

The canonical representation of a link reference is prefixed with the reference type:

[[Source repository>>url:https://github.com/organizations/xwiki]]
[[Syntax Help>>doc:platform:Main.XWikiSyntax]]

InterWiki links have a dedicated reference type:

[[XWiki on Wikipedia>>interwiki:wikipedia:XWiki]]

Two new reference types: relative path and UNC (Universal Naming Convention).

[[Edit this page>>path:$doc.getURL('edit')]]
[[File system access>>unc:\\myserver\path\to\file.txt]]

See the full link specification for more details.

Changes to the image syntax from XWiki Syntax 2.0

You can pass the query string of the image URL as a special image parameter:

[[image:[email protected]||queryString="parameter=value"]]

You can use a relative path as the image reference. This is useful to display images from the skin:

image:path:$xwiki.getSkinFile('logo.png')

It is now possible to reference an icon from the XWiki Icon Set:

image:icon:chart_pie

See the full image specification for more details.

TODO

Bug fixes and improvements

TODO

For Developers

TODO

Upgrades

The following dependencies have been upgraded:

  • AETHER 1.13.1
  • Groovy 1.8.5
  • Hibernate 3.6.9
  • jdeb 0.9
  • Restlet 2.0.11
  • Selenium 2.17
  • Selenium Maven Plugin 2.2
  • SmartGWT 3.0

Translations

The following translations have been updated:

Tested Browsers

Here's the list of browsers tested with this version (i.e. browsers that we've tested as working - Check the list of supported browsers):

Firefox
9.0.1
Chrome
16

Test Report

You can check the manual test report to learn about what was tested and the results on various browsers.

Known issues

Backward Compatibility and Migration Notes

General Notes

If you're running in a multiwiki setup you'll also need to define the property xwiki.store.migration.databases=all to your xwiki.cfg file or explicitly name all databases to be migrated as in xwiki.store.migration.databases=db1,db2,....

You may also want to import the default wiki XAR in order to benefit from all the improvements listed above.

Always make sure you compare your xwiki.cfg and xwiki.properties files with the newest version since some configuration parameters were 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 Enterprise 3.4

Default wiki access method changed to path-based

In virtual mode, XWiki can work in two ways: based on domain names, where each virtual wiki is accessed from a different DNS domain, like wikiname.myfarm.net, and path-based, where each virtual wiki is accessed on a different path of the same domain, like www.myfarm.net/wikis/wikiname/. Since the former mode is harder to set up, since it requires a custom DNS server, we have enabled the second mode by default in this release.

When merging the xwiki.cfg for the migration process, keep in mind that the value of 'xwiki.virtual.usepath' has been changed to a default of 1 instead of 0. If your wiki is set to virtual mode and is using subdomains to access subwikis, make sure to set 'xwiki.virtual.usepath' to 0.

API Breakages

The following APIs were modified since version 3.3:

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