Release Notes for XWiki Enterprise 1.6

Our development team has been working quite hard for the past 2 months on bringing a number of improvements to our flagship product XWiki Enterprise. The focus for the 1.6 release was on having beta versions of new rendering and new WYSIWYG editor, improving the stability and performance.

We closed more than 150 JIRA issues during the release timespan.

Changes since XWiki Enterprise 1.5.x

1. Beta version of new rendering and new WYSIWYG editor

• New experimental support for other syntaxes (Confluence, JSPWiki, Creole, MediaWiki, TWiki and XHTML), including a new XWiki Syntax v2.0.You'll find information on how to enter content using the new syntaxes in the Page Editing Guide.

  Users can choose the syntax they want to use to edit their wiki pages :
  
  

• New experimental WYSIWYG editor (Work In Progress).

  The look & feel is not the final one. Please look at the new WYSIWYG Design page to see what it'll look like (except for the colors which will be different). To start using the new editor, check out the Page Editing Guide. Again this is work in progress but we'd like as much feedback as possible. Please raise any issue you find in JIRA.

  XWiki's new WYSIWYG editor :
  
  

2. Usability Improvements

• XWiki Enterprise's User Interface was improved through the refactoring of page footers : they now provide a quick access to page comments, attachments and history. They also add a new document information tab that lists the page backlinks and let users edit page tags easily.

  The new footer is available at the bottom of every wiki page page :
  
  

  The footer features a brand new document information tab :
  
  

• The much-needed password recovery feature is now available : now, an user who has fogotten his password can simply click on a link available on the login page in order to have a password recovery email sent to him. Similarly, an user who forgot her username can provide her email address and have her username sent back to her.

  Users can retrieve their passwords by clicking on the relevant link on the login page :
  
  

• The Rights Management interface now supports adding groups into groups

3. Platform Improvements

• Default account validation & confirmation emails provided in the wiki preferences
• Added .xml extensions to all exported wiki pages (XAR)
• The generated HTML for wiki titles now start at h1 instead of h2
• The name of the main database in virtual wiki mode is not hardcoded to 'xwiki' anymore, and in virtual mode all database names can be prefixed with a configurable value
• Improvement of Query Manager which was introduced in 1.6M1. The purpose of the Query Manager is to allow using multiple Query Languages and manage them (HQL is one such language). The changes are:
  • Ability to use positional parameters in Query (only named parameters supported earlier).
  • Ability to add a new Query Language easily simply by adding a JAR to the Classpath.
• New experimental XWiki Query Language called XWQL. More about the language in the Query Module documentation. The Main syntax and a translator to HQL are implemented. It currently requires programming rights to use in scripts. The current XWQL syntax is not the final one. We'd like some feedback to improve it. The language will fully replace current 

4. Translations

• New or improved translations:
  • german
  • french
  • czech
  • norwegian
  • ukrainian

5. LDAP

• Use of "." in LDAP logins fixed 

6. Important bugs fixed

• Various fixes in the watchlist:
  • Watchlist now works with platform 1.5 and 1.6
  • Fixed rights checks in multiwiki mode
  • Fixed RSS feed generation in multiwiki
• In some context URLFactory generate URL with wrong server/domain 

7. Others

• XWIKI-2623 - Update MSSQL hibernate mapping file and ship it with xwiki distributions
• XE-300 - The treeview should sort spaces by their name 
• XWIKI-2573 - viewrev action fails with ugly stacktrace for documents with attachments when no revision number is requested
• XWIKI-2649 - xwiki.authentication.ldap.mode_group_sync is not "always" by default
• XE-244 - Upgrade IzPack installer to version 4.0.1 

Known issues

• Bugs we know about

Common Migration notes

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.