Release Notes for XWiki 10.8

Last modified by Thomas Mortagne on 2018/11/30
Contents

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

In this version we have added a new tab in the user profile that displays the groups a user is part of. We've added auto-suggest for pages in several places and improved the startup speed on Tomcat. We've also replaced our CAPTCHA implementation with a new one and it's now very easy to change and preview, from Administration, the CAPTCHA type that it will be used in your wiki. The Menu application is now directly accessible through the Administration.

Some important bugs have been discovered since XWiki 10.8 has been released:

You should wait for the next version of XWiki (10.8.1 or 10.9) that will be released soon!

New and Noteworthy (since XWiki 10.7)

Full list of issues fixed and Dashboard for 10.8.

For Users

New CAPTCHA API and CAPTCHA implementations

 
A new CAPTCHA Application and API have been implemented, replacing the old Captcha Module, thus making it even easier to use and validate a CAPTCHA in a form. Also, it's now very easy to change the CAPTCHA implementation that you want to use in your wiki, directly from Administration, without having to touch a line of code.

Also, a new and much more extensive JCaptcha implementation has been provided for the new API, that works offline and features image, sound and text CAPTCHAS. It is bundled by default with XWiki Standard.

As a popular alternative, a Google reCAPTCHA implementation is also available, installable as an extension using the Extension Manager.

The locations in XWiki where CAPTCHA is being used by default (e.g. Registration and Comments) will use the CAPTCHA implementation that you have enabled and configured in the "Administration >> CAPTCHA" section.

captcha-defaultCaptchaSelection.png
captcha-jcaptcha-options.png
captcha-recaptcha.png
comments-captcha-jcaptcha.png
comments-captcha-recaptcha.png
registration-captcha-jcaptcha.png
registration-captcha-recaptcha.png

Auto-suggest for pages

 
Several inputs related to selecting pages references now support auto-suggestion, making it much simpler to use and less error prone (such as not having to know if the reference should end with WebHome or not!). See the screenshots for some examples.

page-picker.png
user-picker.png
admin-search-suggest.png
admin-theme-suggest.png

User membership in the profile

 
It's now possible to see the groups a user is member of in the profile. See User Profile Application.

groups.png

Updated attachments modal

 
The attachments pop-up that is displayed for deleting an attachment is now a bootstrap modal, having the same functionality as before.

deleteAttachmentModal.png

Miscellaneous

  • Filter group members by their full name: You can now filter the group members by their full name from the live table displayed on the group page or when editing a group from the administration, as long as the members are from the same wiki as the group itself. The members that are from a different wiki than the group can still be filtered by their reference (e.g. by user alias).

For Admins

Menu is now available in Administration

 
The Menu application is now available through the Administration under the Look & Feel category. By default, the application is now hidden from the panels of applications.

admin-menu.png
panel_without_menu.png

Miscellaneous

  • XWiki on WildFly: XWiki now deploys fine out of the box on WildFly 14.x.

  • Notifications Filters Store: Due to scaling issue, we have changed the way the notification filter preferences are stored in the wiki. They are not saved in the user profile pages anymore, but in their own database table.

    A migration to the new store is necessary for existing filter preferences. It is done automatically when you first start XWiki after upgrading, but it may take time.

    Thanks to this improvement, we have re-enabled the default behavior for the Auto Watch feature so that users automatically watch pages they have contributed to.

  • Argument to specify the wait time in the stop_xwiki.sh script: You can now specify, in the stop_xwiki.sh script, the number of seconds to wait for the XWiki lock to be released before exiting. For instance "stop_xwiki.sh -wt 10" will make the script wait 10 second. The default wait time is now 30sec.

For Developers

Group manager

 
A new org.xwiki.user.group.GroupManager and corresponding services.user.group script service are now available.

See more details on User Module.

Miscellaneous

  • No longer committing XML document date fields: Our maven XAR plugin's xar:verify goal will now fail the build if the XAR module contains XML pages with date fields in them. To clear them automatically, just use xar:format which was also updated to remove such fields. This behavior can be skipped for individual files or for the entire project. See the documentation for more details.

  • A new xwiki-commons-collection module has been introduced to share base collection related API

Moved Modules

Upgrades

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

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:

 BrowserTests performed and results
Chrome30.pngGoogle Chrome 69Full tests on product
Firefox30.pngMozilla Firefox 62Not Tested
Edge30.pngMicrosoft Edge 17New and Noteworthy Features + Jira Tickets Marked as Fixed in the Release Notes
IE30.pngInternet Explorer 11Full tests on product/Smoke tests on extensions
Safari30.pngSafari 12Not Tested

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

 DatabaseTests performed and results
hypersql.pngHyperSQL 2.4.1Not Tested
mysql.pngMySQL 5.7Full tests on product/Smoke tests on extensions
oracle.pngOracle 11.2New and Noteworthy Features + Jira Tickets Marked as Fixed in the Release Notes
postgresql.pngPostgreSQL 10Not Tested

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

 Servlet ContainerTests performed and results
tomcat-icon.pngTomcatNot Tested
jetty-icon.pngJetty (XWiki Standalone packaging)Jira Tickets Marked as Fixed in the Release Notes + New and Noteworthy Features
Full tests on product/Smoke tests on extensions
jetty-icon.pngJettyNot Tested

Known issues

Backward Compatibility and Migration Notes

General Notes

  • When upgrading make sure you compare and merge the following XWiki configuration files since some parameters may have been modified, removed or added:
    • xwiki.cfg
    • xwiki.properties
    • web.xml
    • hibernate.cfg.xml
  • Add xwiki.store.migration=1 in xwiki.cfg so that XWiki will attempt to automatically migrate your current database to any new schema. Make sure you backup your Database before doing anything.

Issues specific to XWiki 10.8

  • A migration to the new store is necessary for existing filter preferences. It is done automatically when you first start XWiki after upgrading, but it may take time.

    If you had installed XWiki 10.8RC1, then we changed the new notifications filter table name, which was notification_filter_preferences (in 10.8RC1) to notification_filter_prefs. The previous name was too long for Oracle and was causing a bug. Since it was not a final version, we have decided not to handle the migration.
     
    However, if you really need to upgrade from XWiki 10.8RC1, you need to manually update the database of each wiki, and rename the table "notification_filter_preferences" to "notification_filter_prefs". With MySQL, the command would be:
     
    RENAME TABLE notification_filter_preferences TO notification_filter_prefs;

    Upgrades from prior versions are still supported and automated.

  • If you are doing un upgrade, don't forget to update the following configuration file: hibernate.cfg.xml. In particular, the following line must be present:
    <mapping resource=“notification-filter-preferences.hbm.xml”/>
  • XWiki has been configured to increase startup speed by avoiding JAR scanning, especially on Tomcat. The following was done, which you can modify if you need JAR scanning for some reason (not used by XWiki Standard by default):
    • Addition of metadata-complete="true" and <absolute-ordering /> in XWiki's web.xml
    • Addition of a META-INF/context.xml Tomcat-specific deployment file in XWiki's WAR to prevent Tomcat from doing JAR scanning completely and to avoid scanning for JSP and WebSocket.
  • Auto redirects are now off by default when moving/renaming pages. Rationale:
    • Several users have reported a usability issue about automatic redirects. The way they express it is the following: "I have duplicates pages in my wiki. I don't understand why this is happening. I'm choosing to rename pages and not to copy them but I still get duplicates in the Navigation panel".
    • Automatic redirects are especially useful for public wikis where users can have bookmark on pages and you don't want to break them. It can also be useful for internal wikis but it's less an issue.
    • Even for public wikis not all pages need automatic redirects. Technical pages don't need them for example.
    • We don't have management UIs for redirects FTM and reducing the number of redirects make the wiki easier

    In the future we'll offer a config option to define the default behavior.

API Breakages

The following APIs were modified since XWiki 10.7:

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Credits

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

Adel Atallah
Alex Cotiugă
Constantin Listar
Dominik Roszkowski
Ecaterina Moraru (Valica)
Eduard Moraru
Guillaume Delhumeau
Ilie Andriuta
Marius Dumitru Florea
Oana-Lavinia Florean
Roman Ivanov
Simon Urli
slauriere
Thomas Mortagne
Valdis Vitolins
Vincent Massol
xrichard
吴国凯

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