Release Notes for XWiki 5.2 Milestone 2

Version 50.1 by Marius Dumitru Florea on 2013/09/11

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

The support of XWiki Enterprise Manager is stopped. XWiki Enterprise now comes with the ability to create subwikis, see below.

<insert description of release here>

New and Noteworthy (since XWiki 5.2 Milestone 1)

Full list of issues fixed and Dashboard for 5.2.

Wiki Creation

XWiki Enterprise comes now with the ability for users to create their own wikis (a.k.a subwikis). This supersedes the notion of "workspace" and consist in the integration of the Workspace Application in the default XWiki distribution.

add-wiki.png

Wiki Creation Right

The wiki creation is now possible for users who have the "createwiki" right. This right is only available for the main wiki users, exactly like the Programming Right.

A new section is available in the administration of the main wiki to manage who has this right.

admin-wikis.png

New wiki creation wizard

A new wizard for the creation of a new wiki is now available from the "add" menu.

createwiki1.png

createwiki2.png

XWiki Top Menu

A new top menu has appeared, near the "profile" menu. It provides a link to the main wiki and to the Wiki Directory (which used to be the "Workspace Directory" - the list of all created wikis except the main one).

It is only available when more than one wiki is created, to prevent the user who only want a single wiki to have too much elements in the UI.

new-xwiki-menu.png

Active Installs Tracking

It' very important for the open source committers to understand how well or how badly they're faring when developing the XWiki open source project. So far we didn't know if the number of people using XWiki was increasing, decreasing or staying stable. This module allows us to know who's using XWiki.

It does the following:

  • A client side JAR is bundled with XWiki and it sends a ping with data once per day
  • A server side Application is installed on xwiki.org, allowing us to query the data sent and to display a counter of Active Installs of XWiki (i.e. installs for which we've received a ping in the last N days, for example at least one ping in the past month).

The data sent is anonymous and consists of the following:

  • A unique id (UUID) representing the XWiki instance. Note that not even the IP is kept and there's no way to find who's having a give UUID (it's generated using Java's UUID implementation)
  • The date of the ping
  • The version of your XWiki distribution
  • The technical ids and versions of extensions you have installed.

This will allow us to present the following data:

  • Number of total installs of XWiki
  • Number of Active Installs
  • Most used extensions across versions of XWiki
  • How frequently the XWiki user base upgrades to newer versions of XWiki

stats.png

In the near future we'll offer a UI feature to opt-out (in the Administration pages) but at the moment if you wish to opt-out (please don't, we need your help, knowing who's using us and that it's growing is what keeps us motivated to continue developing XWiki!), then simply remove the WEB-INF/lib/xwiki-platform-activeinstalls* JAR and restart.

Reference documentation:

Miscellaneous

  • The line chart type has two parameters, hideShapes and hideLines, to hide the shapes used to display the data points or to hide the interpolation lines that connect the data points.

    lineWithoutShapes.png

  • When creating or editing a template provider the template name field is now mandatory.

    templateNameMandatory.png

  • New Instance Module used to compute a unique id for each XWiki instance (used by the Active Installs Client API

See the full list of JIRA issues fixed in this release.

For Developers

New WikiStream framework

Wiki Stream goal is to provide generic API to make easier for different representations of a wiki instance to communicate with each other.

It's still in a very early stage and the API might change during 5.x but it's already pretty complete and usable and the following streams modules are provided:

  • XWiki instance input (send WikiStream events from various data of the XWiki instance like the documents in the database etc.)
  • XAR instance output (write a XAR package from WikiStream events)

Forcing IE Compatibility mode

Now, we force the Compatibility mode for Internet Explorer (IE) browsers to use the latest rendering mode.
Before, the IE browser displayed all intranet sites in compatibility mode by default. This means that even if the user was using IE9, he saw the content rendered with IE7 standards. Since we don't support IE6/7 anymore this lead in displaying broken layout, scrollbars, etc. See XWIKI-8907.

Choosing which types of attachments can be displayed inline (Security)

In order to prevent XSS via FileUpload, a new feature has been added : you can now specify in xwiki.properties which types of attachment can be displayed inline.
In the "Attachment" section of xwiki.properties, you can either precise a whitelist of mimetypes that can be displayed inline, or precise a blacklist of mimetypes that shouldn't be displayed inline (if you use this configuration, it is strongly advised to blacklist at least "text/html" and "text/javascript" mimetypes for security reasons).
Note that attachments provided by users having Programming Rights won't be affected by these restrictions.  

Miscellaneous

  • Added support for custom facets in Solr search API

Deprecated and Retired projects

<description of deprecated and retired projects>

Upgrades

The following dependencies have been upgraded:

Translations

The following translations have been updated: 

Tested Browsers & Databases

Here's the list of browsers we support and how they've been tested specifically for this release:

BrowserTestedDetails
Chrome30.pngGoogle Chrome 27PartiallyThe first test (Attach Two Files) from this page
Firefox30.pngMozilla Firefox 23PartiallyThe first 24 tests from this page
IE30.pngInternet Explorer 8PartiallyThese 81 tests
IE30.pngInternet Explorer 9PartiallyThe tests from here and here where the browser is Internet Explorer 9

Here's the list of databases we support and how they've been tested specifically for this release:

DatabaseTestedDetails
hypersql.pngHyperSQL 2.3.0FullyThe tests from these pages: first, second and third 
mysql.pngMySQL 5.6.10Not Tested
oracle.pngOracle 11.2Not Tested
postgresql.pngPostgreSQL 9.2.4Not Tested

For the full list of tests see this page.

Known issues

Backward Compatibility and Migration Notes

General Notes

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 <version>

<issues specific to the project>

API Breakages

The following APIs were modified since <project> <version - 1>:

<clirr output here>
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