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Summary of the XWiki 9.x Cycle

Version 2.1 by Ecaterina Moraru (Valica) on 2017/07/18
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This is a summary of the release notes for XWiki Commons, XWiki Rendering and XWiki Platform, for the whole 9.x cycle (i.e. the whole year 2017). They share the same release notes as they are released together and have the same version.

The biggest highlight of this cycle is ...

Work Done

Information

Midyear statistics

The work is organised using JIRA and here are some JIRA stats of what happened during the 9.x cycle:

  • 586 issues were closed (See the full JIRA issue list)
  • 276 bugs closed, 163 improvements, 30 new features and more:

    jira-issue-types-9x1.png

  • And the top JIRA participants (those contributing to more than 1% of the total jira issue number):

    jira-assignees-9x1.png

Congrats to all who participated!

Top User Features

For our users, here are the top features that we wish to highlight:

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Restore a batch of deleted documents

If you have performed an operation that deletes multiple documents at the same time (like delete with children or delete space), it is now possible to restore all the deleted documents together, to their original state and location.

This is achieved by assigning a common batch ID to the deleted documents in the recycle bin. You can now browse the deleted documents and group them by batch.

For each deleted document, you can now also choose to see the batch where it was deleted from and if you want to restore just one document or the entire batch.

Check the documentation for more details.

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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.

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Improved Attachment Index

The Attachments tab from the Page Index has been improved:

  • the Space and Page columns have been replaced with the Location column
  • the Type column is now the first column and you can sort and filter attachments by file type
  • the Type column uses the Icon Theme and shows a thumbnail preview for image attachments
  • there's a new column that displays the attachment file size, with support for sorting and filtering the attachments by their file size
  • attachments can be filtered by date using the new date range picker

We also fixed two important bugs:

  • the sort was not working correctly
  • attachments from hidden pages were displayed even if hidden pages were not visible

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Improved Notifications email layout

The email layout for notifications has been totally redesigned.

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Improved Code Viewer with Blame View

The code viewer (More Actions > View Source) has been improved to look nicer and have proper line numbers that support highlighting and linking.

A new Blame View was also added to the code viewer. In this mode, each line of the document's content is annotated with the last author that modified it and the revision in which this modification was introduced. The blame view also works when viewing the source of a document revision (other than the latest one) so it can be accessed at any point in the history of a document. See the documentation for more details.

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Improved Notifications UI

The notifications menu is more clear now, and a link to see what has changed is available in the details of each event, when you click on the date.

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Table of content in the notifications email

Now, the events described in the notification emails are ordered by pages, and then by dates. To have a quick view of all the changes, a table of content is now displayed at the beginning of the mail.

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Watchlist to be replaced by Notifications

At the end of the 9.x cycle, we plan to remove the Watchlist Application from XWiki Standard. Before being able to do this, we need that the Notifications Application be able to propose the same features (and even more possibilities).

In this version, you can now receive notifications concerning a watched location (ie: a page, a page and its children, a wiki..), without enabling any specific type of events in the preferences.

Warning

This feature is disabled by default (and the Watchlist Application is active by default). See Notifications Application to know how to enable it.

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Notifications

We have introduced a list of notifications in the top menu, that list some events that have occurred in the wiki recently: a page has been created, a new blog post has been published, etc...

See the Notifications Application's page to have more infos.

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Watched Locations Enhanced

The notifications toggles now take into account the preferences that you have enabled. Events that have not been enabled first will not be displayed anymore, even if you watch a location where these events happen.

Warning

This feature is still disabled by default. See how to test it.

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CKEditor Integration Improvements

The integration with the CKEditor has been improved to support putting dedicated Insert Macro buttons on the tool bar. We enabled the native (in-browser) spellchecker and we fixed a few bugs.

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Improvements of the Menu Application on Mobile

The space taken by the horizontal menus created with the Menu Application has been reduced by introducing menu burgers on Mobile display. The burgers are placed on the left side of the page, to avoid confusion between the Drawer menu and the horizontal menus.

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Help Center Application bundled by default

The Help Center Application has been bundled with the default XE flavor (on the main wiki only) in order to help new users get familiar with XWiki faster. It can be easily accessed from the Applications panel.

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Content menu usability improvements

We've had various reports that people new to XWiki were struggling to find the content menu (edit, create, etc.) so after some discussions, we've decided to try to make it a bit clearer and user-friendly.
The main changes include:

  • adding labels and backgrounds to each menu button to make it clearer that users could/should interact with them
  • merging the 2 action menus into a single one ("More Actions") to address issues with understanding what is the difference between them and also the "fear of the cog" icon, which was confusing some users.

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Grouping of similar Notifications

Similar notifications (for example a page has been updated by the same user several time in a row) are now grouped together and the details of all activities is displayed in the "details" section.

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Standard version of the document in the history

It's now possible to see/compare/revert to the standard version of a document (the one coming from the installed extension) right from the document history view.

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Menu Application bundled by default

The Menu Application has been bundled with the default XE flavor (on the main wiki only) in order to allow admins to easily setup and display a horizontal menu. It can be easily accessed from the Applications panel by admins (members of the XWiki.AdminGroup) only.

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Recommended Templates when creating pages

Depending on the location, when creating a page, the page type could "promote" several Templates and the first one might be automatically selected. This promotion occurs for Templates that have a "creation restriction" matching the current location (or a parent of the current location).

Example: When going to the Blog home page or when on any Blog post, if you try to create a page, you will see that the Blog Post Template will be displayed first in the list and it will be pre-selected. The same thing will happen for applications created with App Within Minutes.

More details in the documentation.

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Notifications can now be received by emails

It is now possible to receive notifications by email. The feature is still quite new and the displayed content will be polished in future versions, but you can already use it.

All you need is to select, on your user settings, the types of notifications you are interested in. The emails are sent periodically and according to you preferences: hourly, daily or weekly.

This feature will progressively replace the Watchlist application that has been available in XWiki for several years now.

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Date filter in Livetables

You can now filter by date in the livetable.

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Notification Filters

When configuring Notifications, it is now possible to control the locations you are interested in. This allows to limit the number of Notifications you receive or only receive specific ones. For example you can decide to receive Notifications when Comments are created but only on the Blog page and its children.

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Attachment Icons use the Icon Theme

The attachment icons displayed on the attachments tab at the bottom of the page is now using the configured Icon Theme.

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Image Attachment Preview

The attachments tab at the bottom of the page is now displaying a preview for image attachments.

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New RSS feed for Notifications

It is now possible to get the notifications occurring on a farm through a RSS feed. The user can access their RSS feeds through two links in the notifications center and in the notifications tray.

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Generate TOC for another page

It's now possible to generate a table of contents for another page with the introduction of the reference parameter.

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Live email notifications

A user can now receive live notifications when some events are triggered in the wiki.
Depending on the platform configuration, when an event that should trigger a live notification is sent, the platform will wait X minutes before sending the notification email. If during this period, new events of the same kind are sent, they will be grouped in the same email. You can get more informations in the Notifications Application documentation.

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Gadget Wizard Update

The Gadget Wizard used to insert and edit the gadgets from the Dashboard has been updated to use the new Macro Wizard from the CKEditor.

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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.

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New default notification filters

Default notification filters can now be created.
When a default notification filter is created, it appears as activated on every profile of every user. Each user can then choose to disable it (or re-enable it) by clicking on the "Advanced filtering options" link in its notification center.

In this version, only one default filter is provided (called "System Filter") and allows each user to hide (or not) notifications coming from the system user of XWiki.

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Notifications Preferences

It is now possible to enable or disable all the notifications sent by an application.

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Filter users in notifications

You now have the ability to black list some users in the notifications you receive (by default you follow everyone).

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Include and exclude Notification filters

A user can now define notification filters that are either inclusive or exclusive.

Notifications that come from a document that matches an exclusive filter will then be discarded.

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Notification email details

It's now possible to configure what kind of information is displayed in the "details" section of the notification emails. Currently, there are 2 levels:

  • None, if you don't want to see change details and only get links to changes
  • Standard to display the change details as diffs.

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Office Import from CKEditor

We upgraded CKEditor Integration to its latest version which brings support for importing office files directly from the CKEditor. There's a dedicated button on the tool bar that opens a dialog where you can select the office file to import and you can choose to filter the styles or to use the Office Viewer macro. Checkout the CKEditor Integration documentation for more information.

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Live Table User Filter

Filtering the Live Table rows by a column that display users should be easier now with the new suggest filter.

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See your own activity in notifications

It's now possible to see your own activity in the notifications (either in the "alert" menu or in the emails). By default, your activity is hidden, but you have the ability to disable this filter in the "advanced filtering options" section of your notification settings.

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Improved Suggest Input for Database List Properties

The edit mode display for Database List properties that have "input" display type and "Use suggest" enabled in their definition has been improved by integrating selectize.js. The new widget handles both single selection and multiple selection properties. See the XWiki Data Model for more information on class properties.

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Confirmation before clearing notifications

Now a confirmation is asked before clearing all notifications.

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Administration Improvements

The Administration has been reorganized. Most of the administration sections from the "Applications" group have been moved to existing or new groups. We applied a consistent style across all the administration sections and we added more hints for the configuration options. The administration menu is now implemented using a collapsible accordion. 

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Notifications Filters Settings revamped

We have changed the way we display Notification Filters in the Notification Settings page. All filters are listed in a single table so that it is easier to manage (adding, disabling, removing from the same place).

Top Admin Features

For our admins, here are the top features that we wish to highlight:

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XWiki Enterprise is dead, long live XWiki Standard!

The XWiki Enterprise distribution of XWiki has been abandoned and replaced in 9.5 by a new XWiki Standard flavor.

Here are the main changes in 9.5 related to distribution packages and flavors:

  • XWiki Enterprise does not exist anymore
  • A new XWiki Standard flavor has been introduced (actually two: one for the main wiki and one for sub wikis like XWiki Enterprise had)
  • Administrators now install XWiki and get to choose which flavor they want (at the time of 9.5 release only XWiki Standard is available but there will be many more as contributors add new ones on http://extensions.xwiki.org) to install on top of it
  • A XIP package is provided to help with offline install use case
  • Graphical installers have been abandoned, too hard to maintain (and not working very well anyway) and not providing much value for something that was unusable in production

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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.

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Set the default level of details for the notification emails

The administrator can decide what is the default value when the users don't touch their settings. The following screen is available in the "Notifications" section in the Administration.

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Live Search in Administration

The administration menu now has a search input at the top that can be used to filter the administration categories and sections. At the moment the live search matches only the category/section name and description.

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Reset Extension changes

It's now possible to reset changes listed in the Extension diff.

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Simplified adding a logo to a Flamingo Theme

Adding a logo to a flamingo theme used to require you to first go into view mode on the theme page and attach the new logo image file before you would be able to see it in edit mode, as an option. Now, we have integrated the attachment selector so that you can upload and select a new logo image directly from edit mode, removing the extra steps. More details in the documentation.

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Menus use the Icon Theme

Before all Icon themes shared the same menu icons (coming from Bootstrap's Glyphicon). Now the Icon themes affect also the icons from the content menu and drawer.

Top Developer Features

For our developers, here are the top features that we wish to highlight:

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Syntax highlighting by default in the wiki editor

The Syntax Highlighting Application is now bundled and enabled by default.

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Extracted the $displayContentFooter layout variable from $displayDocExtra

A new $displayContentFooter layout variable is available to control the display of the section after the document content but before the docextra tabs; i.e. tags, creator and creation date.
Now, $displayDocExtra controls only the display of the docextra tabs, without affecting the content footer section, individualized above.

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Hints for class properties

It is now possible, for developers, to add an hint in a class property. Then this hint is displayed in the object editor.

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Content Menu UIXP

You are now able to contribute new content menu buttons, in addition to the existing Edit, Add, Admin and More Actions by implementing the org.xwiki.plaftorm.menu.content UI Extension Point and specifying the order.

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New icons

We added new mappings for the menu, more-vertical, edit, copy, move, download, log-in, log-out, th icons. They can be used using the Icon Themes service and they have equivalent in both Silk and FontAwesome themes. 

Also with the upgrade to Font Awesome 4.7.0 we improved the mapping for the basket, bell_delete, book_addresses, cake, calendar_add, calendar_delete, cart_add, chart_curve, cursor, emoticon_smile, hourglass, newspaper, note, paintbrush, shape_group, shape_ungroup, sitemap, television, thumb_down, thumb_up, tick, user_add, user_delete, weather_snow icons.

Detailed Release Notes

If you wish to see the full details of all features and improvements you can check each release note.

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