Release Notes for XWiki 7.3 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 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). Some extensions started exploit nested spaces to bring some improvements.

New and Noteworthy (since XWiki 7.3 Milestone 1)

Full list of issues fixed and Dashboard for 7.3.

Flamingo

The "More Options" menu has been split and a new "Page Administration" menu has been introduced:

Breadcrumb

When the hierarchy of a Nested Pages is long, we do not display it entirely any more. Instead, we display a limited version, that the user can expand by clicking on the "ellipsis" character ('...'):

  • limited:

      breadcrumb-limited.png

  • full:

      breadcrumb-full.png

Note that this behavior have also been added to all hierarchy breadcrumbs, including location of search results, etc...

  breadcrumb-search-results.png

The breadcrumb has now support for tree navigation. Each breadcrumb element has a drop down tree that shows the siblings and the children, helping you navigate easily around the wiki.

breadcrumbsTreeNavigation.png

Page Index

Since we have introduced the concept of Nested Spaces we needed to replace the Space column in the LiveTable with a more generic solution. Thus, the Index Application has now merged the previous Page + Space columns into a single Location column and we've introduced new Title column but which now displays the title of pages, as can be seen on the following screenshot:

livetable-location.png

The same strategy is implemented for the children and the siblings viewers.

Note that you can filter at several path levels in the Location column. For example:

location-filter.png

XWiki currently doesn't support filtering on Page titles which is why the new Title column doesn't allow filtering. However since the Location column includes the full path, users can still search on Page names.

At a technical level the displaying of page titles was needed because all non-terminal pages names are called WebHome and displaying that would not be user-friendly.

New Panels

  • A Children Panel has been added to display the list of Children pages of the current Page.

    children.png

  • A Siblings Panel has been added to display the list of Sibling pages of the current Page.

    siblings.png

  • The SpaceDocs Panel has been deprecated and the Children Panel or Siblings Panel should be used instead. A warning message has been added (visible only to Admins) to explain this:

    spacedocs-warning.png

App Within Minutes

Up until this version, the applications created with App Within Minutes were always located in a top level space. For instance, if you wanted to create a "Meeting" application, the application data space was "Meeting". Starting with this version you can also create an application in a nested space. In the first step of the wizard you can select the location where you want the application to be created. In the following image I have create an application with path "Marius / Apps / Meeting".

appLocationPicker.png

Template Providers Administration

The template provider UI has been adapted to Nested Pages and it now supports:

  • Creating template providers deeper than the first level (as it was restricted before), reusing the location picker widget
  • Setting allowed locations (i.e. spaces) using the tree widget

For more details, see the XWIKI-12275 issue and the documentation.

XClass Application

The XClass Application has been modified to support classes defined in nested documents. The default class sheet has been improved to use the new location picker when creating a new class entry, and the list of existing entries is now displayed using a live table. The 'Data types' page has been improved to use the new location picker when creating a new class, and the list of existing classes (data types) is now displayed using a live table.

Miscellaneous

  • The Active Installs Client module had a bug leading to the sinceDays field not being set correctly (was almost always set to 0).
  • New xpage parameter: outputTitle. If true then also display the title in addition to the content. Defaults to false if not specified.
  • The XWiki Syntax help now no longer shows help for syntaxes that are not available in the wiki.

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

For Developers

Flamingo

The content menus are now implemented with UI extensions. The new Extension Points are:

 org.xwiki.plaftorm.editactionsorg.xwiki.plaftorm.adminactionsorg.xwiki.plaftorm.moreoptions

editactions.png

adminactions.png

moreoptions.png

The extension point DrawerItem has now a parameter separator to add a line separator before the drawer item.

Extensions Repository Improvements

  • New Extensions are now created in their own space by default (as the space home page). It will make it easier to organize documentation for large Extensions.
  • Custom Extension repositories are now sent by the Extension Repository REST service

Upgrades

The following dependencies have been upgraded:

Miscellaneous

  • A displayTitle option has been added to the hierarchy macros. By default, it is set to true. When disabled, the names of the references are displayed in the breadcrumb, instead of the document titles.
  • The documentTree macro has been moved to its own module, under the Index application, so that it can be used as a dependency in other modules without pulling the entire Index application.

Tested Browsers & Databases

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 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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