Release Notes for XWiki 9.1-rc-1

Version 12.1 by Manuel Smeria on 2017/03/06

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 version contains mainly CKEditor integration, HTML export and Job REST API improvements. Page delete UI is also a lot safer.

New and Noteworthy (since XWiki 9.0)

Full list of issues fixed and Dashboard for 9.1.

For Users

System and Extension pages are now protected against accidental deletion

 
You will no longer accidentally erase system or extensions pages and break your wiki! When you try to delete such pages, XWiki will now ask you to confirm the operation, and list all concerned pages.

CKEditor Integration Improvements

 
CKEditor has been upgraded to the latest version 4.6.2 which brings a couple of improvements and bug fixes. The XWiki integration has been improved by enabling and configuring the Advanced Content Filter for the XWiki 2.1 syntax. This should prevent the editor from generating content that cannot be saved as wiki syntax. The filter disables automatically the editor features that generate such content. Another improvement concerns the Styles drop down from the tool bar. We removed the styles that were not supported by XWiki and we added some new styles that we hope you will like. The support for wiki rendering macros has also been improved. Inserting a block-level macro in-line will split the paragraph, avoiding the "macro cannot be used inline" error. Besides these improvements, there are a couple of integration bugs that have been fixed.

Miscellaneous

  • In the past, when several long running actions were happening on your wiki (page deletions, copies, subwiki creation, etc), an action had to be finished before the next one could be triggered. This is no longer the case and they run in parallel. If there are common pages affected by the various actions then a wait will still occur.

For Admins

Improved HTML Export

 
The HTML export has been improved to better scale with the Nested Pages concept. The exported pages are now located in directories named after the parent pages in which they are located. In addition a basic HTML index page (index.html) is now generated at the root listing and linking to all exported pages.

Miscellaneous

  • Non interactive mode in distribution job: The Distribution Job (on which Distribution Wizard is based) now support non interactive mode. For example if you want to fully automate an XWiki install and not get the Distribution Wizard you can use the the new Job REST API to start distribution job in non interactive mode before opening the instance to the public.

For Developers

Jobs improvements

 

  • org.xwiki.job.event.status.JobStatus#ask now allows passing a timeout as parameter
  • a new REST API is available to start any job, see Job REST API (require programming right)
  • the existing REST API to get the job status has been improved to also get the request and the log all at once

Miscellaneous

  • Wiki macros can now access current macro descriptor using $xcontext.macro.descriptor binding.

  • In some cases Extension Manager is able to propose to uninstall incompatible existing extension when installing/upgrading an extension. It's possible to force Extension Manager to fail the install plan in such a case to avoid any surprise. Note that it means that if an extension id changed it will fail to upgrade.

Upgrades

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

Translations

The following translations have been updated: 

Tested Browsers & Databases

The QA Tests are executed after the release has been done. Thus, they are being prepared now and will be published soon.

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

No API has been broken since XWiki 9.0!

Credits

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

  • Alexandru Cotiugă
  • Denis Gervalle
  • Eduard Moraru
  • Guillaume Delhumeau
  • Marius Dumitru Florea
  • Thomas Mortagne
  • Vincent Massol

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