Release Notes for XWiki 4.3 Milestone 1

Version 25.1 by Fabio Mancinelli on 2012/10/23
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This is the release notes for XWiki Platform, XWiki Enterprise and XWiki Enterprise Manager. They share the same release notes as they are released together and have the same version.

This is the first milestone of the XWiki 4.3 version (Roadmap). This release brings absolutely nothing? really? Oh, it's not released yet...

New and Noteworthy (since XWiki 4.2)

Workspace Templates

Similar to what admins were doing with the Wiki Manager Application, we noticed the need for the Workspace Application to allow users to choose what type of workspace they want to create.

workspaceTemplates.png

Please see the current workaround for creating workspace templates (as admin) until an easy UI becomes available.

Extension Manager improvements

UI

When you click on "Show details" to get more information about an extension, the extension manager tries to resolve all the dependencies of that extension by making requests to the configured remote extension repositories. These requests slow down considerably the time needed to display the extension details. We fixed this by resolving only the local dependencies at first and then making consecutive AJAX requests to resolve the remote dependencies.

EM-AsyncDependencyLoading.png

The install and uninstall plan is now progressively displayed while it is being created. This is especially useful for the Distribution Wizard since you don't have to wait anymore for the install plan to be created without getting any feedback about its progress.

EM-liveInstallPlan.png

As you can see in the previous image, we also limited the height of the progress tab and the extension job log is automatically scrolled to the end while the job is running.

Private repositories

Maven and XWiki repositories now support authentication. You can indicate a user and a password in xwiki.properties file the following way:

extension.repositories=privatemavenid:maven:http://host.com/private/maven/
extension.repositories.privatemavenid.auth.user=someuser
extension.repositories.privatemavenid.auth.user=password

extension.repositories=extensions.xwiki.org:xwiki:http://extensions.xwiki.org/xwiki/rest/
extension.repositories.extensions.xwiki.org.auth.user=someuser
extension.repositories.extensions.xwiki.org.auth.user=password

Distribution Wizard improvements

The welcome step now lists only the available steps. For instance, when you install XWiki for the first time you don't have any extensions to upgrade so the "Extensions" step is not available.

DistributionWizard-emptyDatabase.png

When a step is done we visually mark it.

DistributionWizard-stepDone.png

REST API improvements

Some improvements have been done to the REST API in order to allow more powerful searches of the data stored in the wiki.

  • Results can be ordered using the /wikis/{wikiName}/search and /wikis/{wikiName}/spaces/{spaceName}/search resources with the following parameters:
  • Advanced search queries can be specified using /wikis/{wikiName}/query resources with the following parameters:
    • q: the query to be executed (it depends on the query type)
    • type: hql, xwql or lucene. Depending on the query type, the q parameter will contain a query matching the type
    • Standard parameters like start, number can be specified to control the number of the results to be returned.
  • Multi-wiki Lucene search using the /wikis/query resource with the following parameters:
    • q: the Lucene query handled by the Lucene plugin (Lucene Plugin)
    • wikis: a comma separated list of wikis where to perform the search.

Miscellaneous

  • XWiki's multiwiki feature (a.k.a "virtual mode") now works with the HSQLDB database
  • It's now possible to configure the LDAP timeout. See xwiki.authentication.ldap.timeout property in xwiki.cfg file.
  • New available Rendering syntax: APT
  • Technical pages of the IRCBot Application are now hidden and the application now registers itself in the Application panel:

    ircbotapp.png

Important Bug Fixes

  • Fixed failure to import Office documents when using Filesystem Attachments.
  • Fixed regression that caused "share by email" and "reset password" functions to fail to send any email.

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

For Developers

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Deprecated and Retired projects

  • The userdirectorty and usertools plugins have been retired since they were unmaintained and mostly replaced by other features such as the Invitation module.

Upgrades

The following dependencies have been upgraded:

Miscellaneous

  • new org.xwiki.rendering.block.CompositeBlock introduce to allow passing several Blocks as one Block
  • new $services.model.getEntityReferenceValue method that returns the value configured for a specific entity type

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):

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x.x

Known issues

Test Report

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

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 4.3 Milestone 1

  • Since the userdirectorty and usertools have been retired you'll need to make sure that your xwiki.cfg configuration files doesn't reference them anymore in the plugins property.

API Breakages

The following APIs were modified since 4.2:

<clirr output here>
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