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

Various usability improvements such as ability to skip the recycle bin, simpler unlike feature, more consistent menus.

New and Noteworthy (since XWiki 12.7)

Full list of issues fixed and Dashboard for 12.8.

For Users

Simplified Unliking

 
A modal was previously asking for confirmation for removing a like on a page. This has been removed to make it simpler and more consistent: liking and unliking are now both immediate actions.

View source in viewers menu section

 
The View source link has been moved to the Viewers menu sub-section of Other actions menu, to be consistent.

Mentions explained on the tips

 
The use of the mentions in WYSIWYG editor autocompletion is now explained on the tips.

View Likes in viewers menu section

 
The menu item for viewing Likes information has been moved to Viewers sub-section of the other options menu, for consistency.

New Comment button

 
The comments section at the bottom of pages used to have the comment editor visible. There's now a Comment button to click when wanting to add a comment. This was done for 3 reasons:

• For consistency with other actions where you have to click a button to do them (annotate, edit, create, etc).
• It makes the UI a bit less cluttered and avoids focusing the attention on comments which was very visible, especially since we moved to using the WYSIWYG editor by default in comments.
• It also improves the loading performance of XWiki pages since the editor doesn't need to be loaded when viewing pages

For Admins

Option to skip the recycle bin

 
There's now an administration option to allow advanced users to choose whether deleted pages are sent to the recycle bin or not.

To do so, search for the "Delete" section in the Administration and set "can skip the recycle bin" to Yes. The default value is No to avoid unwanted loss of data.

Social category in Administration

 
A new Social category has been added in Administration to gather all configurations related to social features. Those items were previously all in the Other category.

Miscellaneous

• Increased timeout for Office: The default timeout to import office documents has been increased for 30 seconds to 1 minute, in order to avoid errors when importing large documents taking more than 30 seconds.

For Developers

Targetable Events disregard Inclusive filters

 
We changed slightly the behaviour of Notification Filters for Targetable Events. These type of events are not concerned anymore by inclusive filters. It means that these events will be received by users even if the location where the event has been sent to is not watched by the user. This is useful for example for Mentions to allow receiving Mentions notifications from any location without needing to watch it.

Note that the exclusive filters are still honored by targetable events: this allows users to keep not receiving notifications on the chosen locations.

Miscellaneous

• New UIXP for the viewers menu section: A new UI Extension Point has been created to be able to extend the Viewers sub-menu of "other options" menu.

• Enable Strict Mode for JSX: XWiki can now be configured to parse and minify wiki-based JavaScript skin extensions (JSX) using strict mode. This is disabled by default but you can enable it from xwiki.properties using:

  skinx.jsStrictModeEnabled = true

  Check the skin extension documentation for more information.

Upgrades

The following runtime dependencies have been upgraded (they have a different release cycle than XWiki Commons, XWiki Rendering and XWiki Platform):

• XStream 1.4.13
• Commons IO 2.8.0
• Checker Qual 3.6.1
• Mockito 3.5.10
• JNR POSIX 3.0.61
• JNR POSIX 3.0.59
• JNR Constants 0.9.17
• Commons Codec 1.15
• Closure Compiler v20200830
• Protobuf Java 3.13.0
• Hibernate 5.4.21
• Apache PDFBox 2.0.21
• PostgresSQL connector 42.2.16
• CKEditor Integration 1.50
• CKEditor 4.15

Translations

The following translations have been updated:

• French
• Norwegian
• Russian
• Korean
• German

Tested Browsers & Databases

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

	Browser	Tested on:
	Google Chrome 85	Not Tested
	Mozilla Firefox 81	Not Tested
	Microsoft Edge 85	Jira Tickets Marked as Fixed in the Release Notes
	Internet Explorer 11	Not Tested
	Safari 14	Not Tested

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

	Database	Tested on:
	HyperSQL 2.5.1	Not Tested
	MySQL 8	Not Tested
	Oracle 19c	Jira Tickets Marked as Fixed in the Release Notes
	PostgreSQL 12	Not Tested
	MariaDB 10.5	Not Tested

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

	Servlet Container	Tested on:
	Tomcat 9.0.38	Jira Tickets Marked as Fixed in the Release Notes
	Jetty 9.4.29 (XWiki Standalone packaging)	Not Tested
	Jetty 9.4.29	Not Tested

Known issues

• Bugs we know about

Backward Compatibility and Migration Notes

General Notes

• When upgrading make sure you compare and merge the following XWiki configuration files since some parameters may have been modified, removed or added:
  • xwiki.cfg
  • xwiki.properties
  • web.xml
  • hibernate.cfg.xml
• Add xwiki.store.migration=1 in xwiki.cfg so that XWiki will attempt to automatically migrate your current database to any new schema. Make sure you backup your Database before doing anything.

Issues specific to XWiki 12.8

New escaping in various displayers

The XClass property view displayers are supposed to produce HTML but some of them were not fully escaping the content which led to invalid HTML in resulting pages and bad display of their content depending on the context (up to totally broken page display in some cases).

The impacted types of properties are:

• String
• TextArea in puretext mode
• Static List
• Database List

This is now fixed but it's possible that some custom code was actually counting on the old behavior.

For example, something might have used it to insert and render HTML through String properties (which are supposed to contain plain text only). A more standard and safe way of providing formatable content in a propery is generally to accept wiki content (which among many things allows to insert HTML) in a TextArea property. It also provides a WYSIWYG to insert content which makes is more usable for simple users. If you absolutely need your String property to be displayed as HTML content, the best is to provide your own "Custom Display", where you configure the property display with the following code:

API Breakages

The following APIs were modified since XWiki 12.7:

• Young API and still not really used externally. Replaced by DEFAULT_LOCALE.
  • Violation type:
    java.field.removed
  • Code:
    ## Old:
    field org.xwiki.store.merge.MergeDocumentResult.DocumentPart.LOCALE

Credits

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

• Anca Luca
• DenisF
• Francisco García Moreno
• Jarle Sandmo
• Johannes Wielsch
• Manuel Leduc
• Marius Dumitru Florea
• Pual
• Roman Ivanov
• Simon Urli
• Thomas Mortagne
• Vincent Massol
• xrichard