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 release comes with multiwiki support enabled by default: users are able to create new wikis without the need to install additional extensions. This is possible because the Workspace Application has been integrated in XWiki Enterprise. We stopped the support for XWiki Enterprise Manager as a consequence. Apart from this, the new release brings a Solr-based live search (to replace the one based on Lucene) and the ability to track active XWiki installs. The Distribution Wizard has a new step to upgrade all wikis. Developers will be interested by the new Wiki Stream framework which can already be used to export large wikis in XAR format. A lot of bug fixes (135) and many improvements (50) complete this release and make it worth trying.

New and Noteworthy (since XWiki 5.1)

Full list of issues fixed and Dashboard for 5.2.

Multi-wiki Support

XWiki Enterprise comes now with the ability for users to create their own wikis (a.k.a subwikis) without the need to install additional extensions. This supersedes the notion of "workspace" and consists in the integration of the Workspace Application in the default XWiki distribution.

This new menu entry appears only if a wiki template is created first, see below.

Wiki Creation Right

The wiki creation is now possible for users who have the "createwiki" right. This right is only available for the main wiki users, exactly like the Programming Right.

Wikis Administration Section

A new section is available in the administration of the main wiki. In this section, you can enable the wiki creation feature by creating a wiki template. It also manages who has the right to create new wikis.

Wiki Creation Wizard

A new wizard for the creation of a new wiki is now available from the "Add" menu.

Home Menu

A new top level menu is available when there is more than one wiki.

The "main wiki" (the first you have when you start a new instance) is now called "Home".

Solr-based Search Suggest

Starting with this version the search suggest feature takes into account the configured search engine. To achieve this we added a new property to SearchSuggestSourceClass that specifies the search engine used by the source. We also created a search suggest service based on Solr and we added search suggest sources that mimic the behaviour of the existing Lucene-based sources. As a result, the search suggest feature is now using Solr by default (as Solr is the default search engine starting with 5.1).

We also improved the search suggest administration section

and we simplified the source creation form.

The live search now displays a message when there are no results.

Distribution Wizard Step to Upgrade All Wikis

We added a new step to the Distribution Wizard to update the default set of wiki pages on each of the existing wikis. This step is triggered only if you choose to upgrade the entire farm in the "Upgrade Mode" step.

Active Installs Tracking

It' very important for the open source committers to understand how well or how badly they're faring when developing the XWiki open source project. So far we didn't know if the number of people using XWiki was increasing, decreasing or staying stable. This module allows us to know who's using XWiki.

It does the following:

• A client side JAR is bundled with XWiki and it sends a ping with data once per day
• A server side Application is installed on xwiki.org, allowing us to query the data sent and to display a counter of Active Installs of XWiki (i.e. installs for which we've received a ping in the last N days, for example at least one ping in the past month).

The data sent is anonymous and consists of the following:

• A unique id (UUID) representing the XWiki instance. Note that not even the IP is kept and there's no way to find who's having a give UUID (it's generated using Java's UUID implementation)
• The date of the ping
• The XWiki distribution id (e.g. org.xwiki.enterprise:xwiki-enterprise-web)
• The version of your XWiki distribution (e.g. 5.2)
• The technical ids and versions of extensions you have installed.

This will allow us to present the following data:

• Number of total installs of XWiki
• Number of Active Installs
• Most used extensions across versions of XWiki
• How frequently the XWiki user base upgrades to newer versions of XWiki

Reference documentation:

• Client side module.
• Server side module.

Toggle Email Address Obfuscation

The email configuration section in the Administration now has an option to enable/disable the obfuscation of the email addresses that are stored in object properties of type Email. The obfuscation is done by displaying only the first letter of the email account, e.g. a...@domain.org, the rest of the letters being replaced by an ellipsis. Email obfuscation is off by default.

Markdown Syntax 1.1

We've added version 1.1 of the Rendering Syntax for Markdown, adding support for:

• Macros
• Superscript and subscript
• (X)HTML improvements

Export Large Wikis as XARs

It's possible to enable the use of new WikiStream framework in standard export action (used in the standard export UI for example). Among other things it allows exporting a wiki of pretty much any size.

WikiStream is too young to be enabled by default and will require heavy testing. In the meantime you can try it by uncommenting #xwiki.action.export.xar.usewikistream=1 at the end of xwiki.cfg file.

Miscellaneous

• The blog application is now packaged by default in the Home wiki only (not in new wikis).

• The user profile menu is now consistent with the administration menu.

  

• The line chart type has two parameters, hideShapes and hideLines, to hide the shapes used to display the data points or to hide the interpolation lines that connect the data points.

  

• When creating or editing a template provider the template name field is now mandatory.

  

• The checkboxes for the global rights settings are now displayed on the left of their labels.

  

• The "Create a new wiki" link has been removed from the wiki index. Now, you can only use the Add > Wiki menu.
• The Distribution Wizard does not appear anymore just after creating a new wiki based on the default template.

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

For Developers

JSON Parsing in Velocity

$jsontool.parse('["json string"]') can now be used to parse a serialized JSON into json-lib arrays or objects.

Only valid JSON strings can be parsed. JSONP is not supported. If the argument is not valid JSON, then null is returned, parsing exceptions are caught.

Query String Escaping

The following method $escapetool.url(Map<String, ?>) has been added to the escapetool module. It allows to create a properly URL-escaped query string from a map of parameters. The key in the map is the parameter name and the value can be an object, an array of objects or a collection of objects. String.valueOf(Object) is used to serialize the objects (values). For example $escapetool.url({'alice': ['A&A', 'M&M'], 'bob': [13, 27]}) would return alice=A%26A&alice=M%26M&bob=13&bob=27. See XCOMMONS-435.

New XWikiDocument API to Remove an Attachment

XWikiDocument#deleteAttachment methods have been deprecated in favor of the combination of XWikiDocument#removeAttachment and XWiki#saveDocument. This make attachment deletion follow the same behavior as xobject and among other things allow doing all sort of modifications to a XWikiDocument without touching the database until we decide to apply them by saving the document.

Choosing which types of attachments can be displayed inline (Security)

In order to prevent XSS via FileUpload, a new feature has been added : you can now specify in xwiki.properties which types of attachment can be displayed inline.
In the "Attachment" section of xwiki.properties, you can either precise a whitelist of mimetypes that can be displayed inline, or precise a blacklist of mimetypes that shouldn't be displayed inline (if you use this configuration, it is strongly advised to blacklist at least "text/html" and "text/javascript" mimetypes for security reasons).
Note that attachments provided by users having Programming Rights won't be affected by these restrictions. 

Forcing IE Compatibility Mode

Now, we force the Compatibility mode for Internet Explorer (IE) browsers to use the latest rendering mode.
Before, the IE browser displayed all intranet sites in compatibility mode by default. This means that even if the user was using IE9, he saw the content rendered with IE7 standards. Since we don't support IE6/7 anymore this lead in displaying broken layout, scrollbars, etc. See XWIKI-8907.

New Filter Module

Commons has a new core module for all streaming systems based on filters like Rendering and the Wiki Stream. See Filter Module documentation.

New Wiki Stream Framework

Wiki Stream goal is to provide generic API to make easier for different representations of a wiki instance to communicate with each other.

It's still in a very early stage and the API might change during 5.x but it's already pretty complete and usable.

The the following streams modules are provided in 5.2:

• XWiki instance input (send WikiStream events from various data of the XWiki instance like the documents in the database etc.)
• XWiki instance output (generate and save various data of the XWiki instance like the documents from WikiStream events)
• XAR instance output (write a XAR package from WikiStream events)
• XAR instance input (generate WikiStream events from a XAR package)

New Eclipse CS Extension

XCOMMONS-353 made our checkstyle.xml file unusable as it is in Eclipse cs because of the custom rule that could not be found in the Eclipse classpath.

xwiki-commons-tool-verification-resources module is now also an Eclipse cs extension which mean you can just drop its jar in Eclipse plugins/ folder and you will get the XWiki checkstyle configuration listed in the standard configurations.

Deprecated and Retired projects

• Google plugin (com.xpn.xwiki.plugin.google.GooglePlugin) has been retired, you can find it on https://github.com/xwiki-contrib/retired/tree/master/xwiki-platform-google-plugin

Upgrades

The following dependencies have been upgraded:

• Aether 0.9.0.M2 (moved from org.sonatype.aether to org.eclipse.aether)
• CSSParser 0.9.9
• Groovy 2.1.7
• HSQLDB 2.3.0
• Infinispan 5.3
• JGroups 3.3.4
• Maven 3.1.0
• Tika 1.4
• Xerces2-Java 2.11.0

Miscellaneous

• Added support for custom facets in Solr search API
• New Instance Module used to compute a unique id for each XWiki instance (used by the Active Installs Client API
• The way to declare the type supported by a org.xwiki.properties.converter.Converter component changed from role hint to generic type. See Properties Module documentation for more details. The old way is still supported for retro-compatibility.
• Added DocumentReference and EntityReference property converters which makes possible to:
  • use them in rendering macros parameters beans (see How to write a macro)
  • in Velocity pass a String directly to a method requiring a DocumentReference or EntityReference
• Added new API to the JODA Time plugin to get an ISO8601 formatter.

Translations

The following translations have been updated: 

• Catalan
• Czech
• Danish
• German
• Spanish
• French
• Galician
• Italian
• Korean
• Latvian
• Dutch
• Polish
• Portuguese
• Portuguese (Brazil)
• Romanian
• Russian
• Slovak
• Swedish
• Ukrainian
• Vietnamese
• Simplified Chinese
• Traditional Chinese

Tested Browsers & Databases

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

	Browser	Status
	Google Chrome 30	Not Tested
	Mozilla Firefox 24	Not Tested
	Internet Explorer 8	Not Tested
	Internet Explorer 9	Not Tested

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

	Database	Status
	HyperSQL 2.3.0	Not Tested
	MySQL 5.6.10	Not Tested
	Oracle 11.2	Not Tested
	PostgreSQL 9.2.4	Not Tested

Known issues

• Bugs we know about

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.

Solr Index Format Change

If you're upgrading from XWiki 4.5.x to this version you'll need to perform a full re-indexation when using the Solr Search. To do this you have to delete the solr folder from the configured permanent directory. This is needed because in XWiki 4.5.x the Solr search was experimental and we've completely changed the indexing format (i.e. the Solr schema) in XWiki 5.1.

Email Address Obfuscation

In 4.2 we introduced a new object property type called Email that can be used to store email addresses. In 5.1 we decided to use this new property type in the user profile to store the user email address. With this change we also introuced a defaut custom displayer for the Email property type that obfuscates the email address in view mode. As a consequence the user profile email address became obfuscated by default. Starting with 5.2 we allow you to toggle the email address obfuscation from the administration. What is important to know is that the email address obfuscation is off by default. So if you upgrade from 5.1 and you want to preserve the obfuscation then you need to enable it from the administration.

Instance Identifier

XWiki now creates a unique identifier in the database (this is used by the new Active Installs module and will be used in the future by the Extension Manager to identify your instance for example). You need to verify that your hibernate.cfg.xml file has the following mapping definition next to the existing mapping definitions:

Multi-Wiki

When you upgrade from an old XEM farm, you might not have the user interface to handle multi-wiki just after the upgrade. In this case, just go in the "Wikis" section of the administration (in the main wiki), and click to "create a template first" in the "Wiki Template" subsection. It should fix the issue.

API Breakages

The following APIs were modified since XWiki 5.1:

• Moved to xwiki-commons-legacy-properties

• This method should never have existed

• Moved from xwiki-rendering-api to xwiki-rendering-xml

• This field is not meant to be be modified, the final was just forgotten.

• Not an API. This should be internal.

• Has been moved to xwiki-platform-feed-api since it was the only module using it. We also dropped jTidy in favor of HTMLCleaner.

• Google API plugin has been retired

• Return the number of imported documents

• The JPQLParser generates source code (that should be internal but it is not) and the grammar has changed a bit.