December is over and this means we've finished the XWiki 17.x cycle. It's time to look back at what we achieved in 2025.
In the 17.x cycle, the headline change was XWiki's move to Jakarta EE 9.1, which allows XWiki to run on recent versions of the supported application servers (like Tomcat 10+ and Jetty 12 EE9/10). Performance was a strong focus throughout the year: document saves are now much faster (only the modified objects are sent to the database and history diffs are no longer stored), the main view now prepares (caches) macros for faster page rendering, icons load faster, notifications are dispatched more quickly and Solr indexing was sped up. On the editing side, we redesigned the realtime editing toolbar, entirely revamped the macro configuration UI of the WYSIWYG editor, improved the definition of wiki macro parameters, started uploading pasted images as attachments, and now keep unsaved changes in the session storage. On the security front, we added a new UI to set and enforce the required rights of a page, and a new mechanism that warns users before they follow untrusted external URLs. Administrators gained dynamic configuration through environment variables and Java system properties, the ability to exclude pages from search, and new remote observation (cluster management) features. We also kept improving Live Data (migrated to Vue 3, better pagination) and navigation (users with edit rights can now pin and reorder pages, and panel columns can be toggled and resized), added the option to store attachments and recycle bins in Amazon S3 (or S3-compatible) storage, removing the need for a shared file system in clustering setups, and as every year we fixed a lot of bugs, released security updates and worked on accessibility (36 WCAG issues were closed in 2025).
A new, still experimental, BlockNote-based WYSIWYG editor has also been introduced, along with a new Yjs WebSocket endpoint to help developers implement Yjs-based real-time collaboration.
As usual, we also had releases for Cristal, a modular wiki UI using modern web technologies and supporting multiple backends, including XWiki, to store wiki data.
Here are some links to visual reports of what was done in 17.x:
- High importance changes
- Medium importance changes
- Low importance changes
- All changes having screenshots
- All user-related changes
In total we fixed 839 issues. A pretty busy year as usual 
Here's the full list of notable changes done in XWiki 17.x:
