Release Notes for XWiki 7.3 Milestone 1

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 is the first of the 2 stabilization releases that happen at the end of each yearly Cycles. Lots of polishing has been done, especially for the recently introduced Nested Pages feature and its consequences on the UI redesign (modified menus for example).

New and Noteworthy (since XWiki 7.2)

Full list of issues fixed and Dashboard for 7.3.

Office Importer

The Office Importer Application has been redesigned visually and now supports importing into Nested Spaces:

OfficeImporter

Flamingo

The search bar on the top of the screen have been improved a bit.

When the user clicks on the search button, the search bar is opened and gets the focus. Then, when the users clicks in other place, the search bar is closed, slowly.

  • Closed:

      search-closed.png

  • Open:

      search.png

Flamingo Theme Editor

The Flamingo Theme Application now handles the @lessCode field. It means that you can add any code, written with LESS, to your theme and see the result live!

LESSCode.png

Miscellaneous

  • The Extension Diff view has been improved to display the page (translation) language both in the summary and the detail sections. The page name (heading) from the detail section is now a link to the local version of the page.

    extensionDiff.png

  • Added the Actions column for the FAQ Application:

    faqActions.png

  • In the Drawer (top right menu), the pages for which the user doesn't have permissions to access are not displayed anymore.
  • The user's avatar is now displayed between the search icon and the drawer icon:

    avatar.png

  • Pages with Slovak and Brazilian Portuguese language are now indexed by Solr and thus they are included in the search results. See the Migration Notes below in case you are performing an upgrade and you want support for these languages.
  • Clicking on the Logo (top-left of the screen) will now take you to the page that you have configured as wiki homepage by using the "Wiki Administration > Wikis > Descriptor" section. See the related documentation section.
  • The template providers edition has been rewritten to be more consistent with other edit forms:

      template-provider-edit.png

  • Removed the 'Edit' button when editing a template provider document. See XWIKI-12675
  • The Invitation Application now has an entry point in the App Bar (only visible to Admins).

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

For Developers

Extension Manager improvements

Custom repositories

Extensions and dependencies can now provide custom repositories. For now only dependencies repositories are directly used when resolving it before trying registered repositories.

In practice it means that Maven custom repositories are now supported properly (at least to resolve artifacts dependencies). On Extension Manager side it means you get the same custom repositories duplicated in the Extension and in each ExtensionDependency.

Support also been added to Extension Repository API. It's also imported in XWiki based Extension Repository implementation but not yet exposed as REST resource.

Resolve dependencies in extension repository first

The extension repository is checked first when searching for extension dependencies.

REST API improvements

It's now possible to get a page with everything but attachment content: for this you can enable various part of the document using the following URL parameters:

  • objects: enable returning document objects
  • class: enable returning document class properties
  • attachments: enable returning document attachments

They are all disabled by default.

Page objects support has also been added to the Page PUT API.

See The XWiki RESTful API for more details.

Flamingo Improvements

The Drawer menu is now implemented with UI extensions. The new Extension Points are:

 org.xwiki.plaftorm.drawerorg.xwiki.plaftorm.drawer.header

drawer-with-languages.png

drawer-header.png

Miscellaneous

  • New getReference() API public scripting Element (Object, Class, etc.) to get the EntityReference of the element
  • New functional tests for the Office Importer Application have been added to xwiki-platform. To enable them, you need to enable the new profile office-tests.
  • For testing purpose, an environment variable XWIKI_OFFICE_HOME can bet set to configure where the Office server is installed on the system.
  • New Time Zone XProperty type to represent Time Zones.
  • The XAR plugin now verifies that Technical Pages are set as hidden and the Format Mojo sets them as hidden.
  • A new XAR Integration testing framework has been introduced. It can be used to write integration tests for wiki pages.
  • Issue management information are now imported, displayed and exposed in the REST service in the Extensions Repository

Deprecated and Retired projects

  • The XML-RPC Integration has been retired. It had been deprecated several years ago in favor of the REST API and it wasn't actively supported.

Upgrades

The following dependencies have been upgraded:

Translations

The following translations have been updated: 

Tested Browsers & Databases

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

BrowserTest Result
Chrome30.pngGoogle Chrome 45Not Tested
Firefox30.pngMozilla Firefox 41Jira Tickets Marked as Fixed in the Release Notes
IE30.pngInternet Explorer 10Not Tested
IE30.pngInternet Explorer 11Not Tested

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

DatabaseTest Result
hypersql.pngHyperSQL 2.3.2Jira Tickets Marked as Fixed in the Release Notes
mysql.pngMySQL 5.6.24Not Tested
oracle.pngOracle 11.2 XWIKI-12625
postgresql.pngPostgreSQL 9.4.1Not Tested

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.

Issues specific to XWiki 7.3-milestone-1

  • If you had modified the custom displayer for Time Zones in either XWiki.XWikiUsers or XWiki.XWikiPreferences then when upgrading to 7.3M1 your change will be removed. This is because we've introduced a Time Zone XProperty type which is replacing the String type used before for storing the Time Zones. If you wish to put back your change you can define a custom displayer on the new Time Zone XProperty in XWiki.XWikiUsers or XWiki.XWikiPreferences.
  • In order to add support for Slovak and Brazilian Portuguese languages to the Solr search we had to modify the Solr schema and unfortunately we don't have support for automatic Solr search index migration at this point. If you want to support these languages you have to delete the 'solr' folder from the configured permanent directory of your XWiki instance. The Solr index will be recreated automatically and the entire wiki/farm (including the pages in the Slovak and Brazilian Portuguese language) will be re-indexed after a server restart.

API Breakages

The following APIs were modified since 7.2:

  • Add support for custom repositories in extensions:
    org.xwiki.extension.Extension: Method 'public java.util.Collection getRepositories()' has been added to an interface
    org.xwiki.extension.ExtensionDependency: Method 'public java.util.Collection getRepositories()' has been added to an interface
  • New URL parameters:
    org.xwiki.rest.resources.pages.PageResource: In method 'public org.xwiki.rest.model.jaxb.Page getPage(java.lang.String, java.lang.String, java.lang.String, java.lang.Boolean)' the number of arguments has changed
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