Release Notes for XWiki Enterprise 1.4

The focus for the 1.4 release was on improving the stability, performance and usability in general.

Farm administrators : XWiki Enterprise 1.4 has introduced a regression for group management in farm mode. We strongly suggest to use XWiki Enterprise 1.3.2 or wait for XWiki Enterprise 1.4.1 (to be released ASAP) before upgrading a wiki farm.

Changes since XWiki Enterprise 1.3

1 Platform Improvements

• XWiki now requires Java 1.5 to run.
• The XWiki GWT API was upgraded to GWT 1.4. GWT is used for XWiki Watch, Curriki & the coming New WYSIWYG Editor
• Refactoring of the XWiki XMLRPC interface. Several new methods were added to the API (translations, objects querying, etc). Those improvements were required in order to add Object Edition Support to XEclipse (upcoming).
• JavaScript rationalization (functions written with Rico were coded anew using Scriptaculous in order to reduce the number of JS frameworks we use). Note that our preferred JavaScript framework is now Prototype + Scriptaculous. This means we'll first look in these frameworks to try to implement new features using JavaScript and only use another one if not found and we really need the feature implemented.

2 Attachment Rollback

• When rollbacking a wiki page, attachments versions are now rollbacked as well.
• The option to deactivate attachment versioning was added. If you're not interested in versioning attachments this can speed up your XWiki instance.

3 Skin Improvements

• 2 new colors were added for the toucan skin : Black & Dark Blue.

  The new Black color for the toucan skin
  

  The new Dark BLue color for the toucan skin
  

• The brand new skin extensions plugin was committed.

4 Keyboard Shortcuts

• Keyboard shortcuts were made a generic feature using a standard keyboard shortcuts set.

5 Performance Improvements

• Improved statistics performances. Statistics were impacting XWiki peformance. They're now queue and written to the database in a seprate thread resulting to minimal performance slowdown. We now recommend leaving them on.
• The Index page now scales to any unlimited number of documents in your wiki since it now uses a dynamic Ajax table with filtering features (see below).
• The TreeView on the AllDocs page (Main.AllDocs) now expands its nodes dynamically instead of loading all the wiki pages in memory, thus greatly improving the performances
• There's a new Admin page in the default XAR (XWiki.RequestsStatus) which allows you to monitor all requests coming into your XWiki instance. It gives you averages on execution times, current requests, unfinished requests and more.
• The Lucene plugin now indexes documents by batch (1000 at a time). This was required for heavy sites where indexing all documents at once required lots of memory.
• The Lucene plugin now check for documents to be indexed every 30 seconds (instead of every 5 minutes) thus leading to indexed documents that can be searched much faster.
• We've disabled some unused Radeox macros thus leading to improve rendering performances.
• The history page now load only the last 50 revisions by default, leading to much improved performances.

  The new Admin page to monitor Requests in your XWiki instance
  

6 Usability Improvements

• The Index page was improved to add realtime page filtering.

  The new Index page
  

7 Important bugs fixed

• Print and Print Preview now print the whole content of a document.
• CC field is not taken into account when using sendMessageFromTemplate in the MailSender plugin.
• Fixed some statistics which were offset by one day in the graph.
• The paragraph filter now replaces any number of consecutive newlines with a paragraph (it was only replacing two consecutive newlines).

8 Others

• It's now possible to add redirections for incoming requests.
• The Lucene plugin can now do reverse sorting. Unfortunately, this feature is available only in the plugin API, and not in the provided Lucene search page, which will be refactored some time later.
• MailSender plugin now allows setting Reply-To, Sender (and any other) headers when sending mails.
• The Watchlist feature now adds a diff in the email it sends when watched documents or spaces are modified. The diff is between "first revision since last notification" and "last revision". 
• Added better Active Directory support by supporting case insensitive username.
• Improved automated database migration support (for example when some documents have some invalid revisions, they are ignored and the migration continues without stopping, reporting the issue in the console).
• Added Galician translation 

Known issues

• Bugs we know about

Common Migration notes

The database structure has been changed but we have set up an automatic migration system so you shouldn't have to touch your Database to upgrade to 1.4M2. Thus you can simply install this version and configure it to point to your existing database. Just make sure you backup it before upgrading.

You may also want to import the default wiki XAR in order to benefit from improvements listed above. Make sure you read the XWiki upgrade guide before importing the new XAR since it can cause an overwrite of changes you made to some pages.