Release Notes for XWiki 6.4-milestone-2

Last modified by Thomas Mortagne on 2023/10/13

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

This milestone brings mainly UI improvements in the Menu application, Mail application and Flamingo skin, while offering developers the ability to write LESS in Skin Extensions, a cool icon picker and new ConfigurableClass and Mail Sender API features.

New and Noteworthy (since XWiki 6.4-milestone-1)

Full list of issues fixed and Dashboard for 6.4.

Menu Application

Taking advantage of the ability to have LESS inside our StyleSheetExtensions, we improved the Menu Application, on Flamingo based skins, making it responsive and also adapting its styling according to the active Flamingo Theme.
Colibri based skins preserve the initial styling. 

Mail Feature

  • The mail feature has a new Category in the Admin UI (see the Mail Application for details).

    emailcategory.png

  • There's now the possibility to configure default BCC addresses which will be added by default to all emails sent using the Mail Sender API.

    emailsend.png

  • The Mail Sender API now checks for permission before sending emails, when using it from scripts (i.e. when using the Mail Sender Script Service). There are currently 2 possible strategies that you configure in your xwiki.properties file
    #-# [Since 6.4M2]
    #-# Defines which authorization checks are done when sending mails using the Mail Sender Script Service.
    #-# Example of valid values:
    #-# - "programmingrights": the current document must have Programming Rights
    #-# - "alwaysallow": no check is performed. This is useful when running XWiki in a secure environment where we
    #-#   want to allow all users to be able to send emails through the Script Service.
    #-# The default is:
    # mail.sender.scriptServiceCheckerHint = programmingrights

Flamingo

We partially restored the behaviour of the top level menu from version 6.2, with some improvements:

  • for tablet and desktop
    • the menu label is a link used for navigation
    • the toggle (arrow / caret) is used for opening the drop down menu, but should be better separated from the label
  • on phones the behaviour remains the same: taping on the label opens the menu

The history table, under each page, is now responsive to the screen size:

responsive-history.png

Miscellaneous

  • The selected tree node is now highlighted even when links are enabled:

    highlightSelectedTreeNode.png

  • A list of icons supported by XWiki have been created, with mapping for Silk and Font Awesome. Which means that we now propose a list of icons that are both present in Silk and Font Awesome.
  • The list of columns in the UserDirectory customization screen is now sorted alphabetically
  • The accuracy of the attachment content type detection has been improved. If the file name extension is unknown then we attempt to detect the content type from the first bytes of the file content. You can check this by attaching a text file without the 'txt' file name extension.

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

For Developers

Mail Sender Permissions

There's now a pluggable permission checker used for checking if a mail should be sent, when using the Mail Sender Script Service. Two implementations are provided (see above) but you can also provide your own implementation by implementing the org.xwiki.mail.script.ScriptServicePermissionChecker component role:

@Role
@Unstable
public interface ScriptServicePermissionChecker
{
   /**
     * @param message the message to check for authorization
     * @exception MessagingException if the message is not allowed to be sent
     */

   void check(MimeMessage message) throws MessagingException;
}

For example you could imagine implementing checks on the size of the email or who the recipients are, run the content of the mail through some filter, etc.

Icon Picker

An icon picker has been created to help users selecting an image in the list of supported icons.

icon-picker.png

This picker is already used in Application Within Minutes for the application's icon selection.

Skin Extensions

Now you can use LESS in your Skin Extensions!. You just need to set the new property "Content Type" to LESS inside your Skin Extension object:

contentTypeLESS.png.

Admin ConfigurableClass

The ConfigurableClass mechanism has been improved to be able to contribute new categories in the Admin UI. For example the "Email" Category in the following screenshot is contributed through a ConfigurableClass:

emailcategory.png

It was configured using:

emailconfigurableclass.png

Upgrades

The following dependencies have been upgraded:

Miscellaneous

  • It's now possible to know what namespace a ComponentManager instance is associated with by casting it to  org.xwiki.component.manager.NamespacedComponentManager. See Component Module documentation.
  • Added getCurrentWikiDescriptor() method to the wiki API and script service to be consistent with the existing getCurrentWikiId() method
  • The ClassLoader automatically set as Thread ClassLoader is now dynamic meaning that any modification of the context wiki will automatically change the actual Thread ClassLoader. It used to be set to whatever was the wiki in the URL at ExecutionContext init.
  • A new CSS class have been added in Flamingo, to handle responsive tables.
  • The #sheetTitle Velocity macro supports a new use case: displaying the sheet title if the current document doesn't have an object of some type:
    #sheetTitle('The sheet used to display objects of type Space.MyClass', 'Space.MyClass')

Translations

The following translations have been updated: 

Known issues

Backward Compatibility and Migration Notes

General Notes

When upgrading make sure you compare your xwiki.cfg, xwiki.properties and web.xml files with the newest version since some configuration parameters may have been modified or 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.

API Breakages

The following APIs were modified since XWiki 6.3:

  • It's very unlikely that this class is implemented by anything else and it does not make much sense to not have this method, since this is not really a cache behind it but a Map that keep engines forever it may create a memory leak on a big farm running for a long time
    org.xwiki.velocity.VelocityFactory: Method 'public org.xwiki.velocity.VelocityEngine removeVelocityEngine(java.lang.String)' has been added to an interface
  • This shouldn't be a backward incompatible change since it's a method addition on an Annotation.
    org.xwiki.component.annotation.Component: Method 'public boolean staticRegistration()' has been added to an interface
  • Young API, this method needs to be available for consistency with the getMainWikiDescriptor/Id pair of methods
    org.xwiki.wiki.descriptor.WikiDescriptorManager: Method 'public org.xwiki.wiki.descriptor.WikiDescriptor getCurrentWikiDescriptor()' has been added to an interface
  • Young API, adding a method to check permissions for sending mail and a method to configure default BCC addresses to use when sending mail.
    org.xwiki.mail.MailSenderConfiguration: Method 'public java.util.List getBCCAddresses()' has been added to an interface
    org.xwiki.mail.MailSenderConfiguration: Method 'public java.lang.String getScriptServicePermissionCheckerHint()' has been added to an interface
  • Young API, this method should not have been made public.
    org.xwiki.mail.script.MimeMessageWrapper: In method 'public MimeMessageWrapper(org.xwiki.mail.internal.ExtendedMimeMessage, javax.mail.Session, org.xwiki.mail.MailSender, org.xwiki.context.Execution, org.xwiki.component.manager.ComponentManager)' the number of arguments has changed
    org.xwiki.mail.script.MimeMessageWrapper: Accessibility of method 'public MimeMessageWrapper(org.xwiki.mail.internal.ExtendedMimeMessage, javax.mail.Session, org.xwiki.mail.MailSender, org.xwiki.context.Execution, org.xwiki.component.manager.ComponentManager)' has been decreased from public to package
  • WYSIWYG's MacroService API was not previously considering a multiwiki environment.
    org.xwiki.gwt.wysiwyg.client.plugin.macro.MacroService: Method 'public org.xwiki.gwt.wysiwyg.client.plugin.macro.MacroDescriptor getMacroDescriptor(java.lang.String, java.lang.String, java.lang.String)' has been added to an interface
    org.xwiki.gwt.wysiwyg.client.plugin.macro.MacroService: Method 'public java.util.List getMacroDescriptors(java.lang.String, java.lang.String)' has been added to an interface
    org.xwiki.gwt.wysiwyg.client.plugin.macro.MacroServiceAsync: Method 'public void getMacroDescriptor(java.lang.String, java.lang.String, java.lang.String, com.google.gwt.user.client.rpc.AsyncCallback)' has been added to an interface
    org.xwiki.gwt.wysiwyg.client.plugin.macro.MacroServiceAsync: Method 'public void getMacroDescriptors(java.lang.String, java.lang.String, com.google.gwt.user.client.rpc.AsyncCallback)' has been added to an interface
  • Add new methods to the Icon Set Module
    org.xwiki.icon.IconManager: Method 'public java.util.List getIconNames()' has been added to an interface
    org.xwiki.icon.IconManager: Method 'public java.util.List getIconNames(java.lang.String)' has been added to an interface
    org.xwiki.icon.IconSetManager: Method 'public java.util.List getIconSetNames()' has been added to an interface
  • LESS refactoring.
    org.xwiki.lesscss.LessCompilerScriptService: Method 'public boolean clearCacheFromFileSystemSkin(java.lang.String)' has been removed
    org.xwiki.lesscss.LessCompilerScriptService: Return type of method 'public org.xwiki.lesscss.ColorTheme getColorThemeFromSkinFile(java.lang.String)' has been changed to org.xwiki.lesscss.colortheme.ColorTheme
    org.xwiki.lesscss.LessCompilerScriptService: Return type of method 'public org.xwiki.lesscss.ColorTheme getColorThemeFromSkinFile(java.lang.String, java.lang.String)' has been changed to org.xwiki.lesscss.colortheme.ColorTheme
    org.xwiki.lesscss.ColorTheme: Class org.xwiki.lesscss.ColorTheme removed
    org.xwiki.lesscss.ColorThemeCache: Class org.xwiki.lesscss.ColorThemeCache removed
    org.xwiki.lesscss.LESSCache: Class org.xwiki.lesscss.LESSCache removed
    org.xwiki.lesscss.LESSColorThemeConverter: Class org.xwiki.lesscss.LESSColorThemeConverter removed
    org.xwiki.lesscss.LESSCompiler: Class org.xwiki.lesscss.LESSCompiler removed
    org.xwiki.lesscss.LESSCompilerException: Class org.xwiki.lesscss.LESSCompilerException removed
    org.xwiki.lesscss.LESSSkinFileCache: Class org.xwiki.lesscss.LESSSkinFileCache removed
    org.xwiki.lesscss.LESSSkinFileCompiler: Class org.xwiki.lesscss.LESSSkinFileCompiler removed
Tags:
   

Get Connected