Release Notes for XWiki Enterprise 1.8

The focus on 1.8 branch was on making the new rendering architecture and the new GWT based WYSIWYG able to fully replace the "old" rendering and TinyMCE based WYSIWYG. This version introduce conditional loading of JavaScript and StyleSheet in order for pages to load faster, sending to the browser only the files it needs to display the requested pages. This might break existing applications developed on top of XWiki that relied on such JavaScript and CSS files being present all the time. See Applications migration section for more details

Changes since XWiki Enterprise 1.7

1. First usable versions of new Rendering and new WYSIWYG editor

• Add ability to configure XWiki to use the XWiki Syntax 2.0 as default when creating new pages.
• First usable version of the new GWT WYSIWYG editor.
• New UserAvatar macro for 2.0 syntax.
• new RSS macro for 2.0 syntax.
• Added wiki syntax for embedded documents
• Syntax API to convert a document from one syntax to another + new converter from XWiki Syntax 1.0 to XWiki Syntax 2.0. You can try it by changing the syntax identifier of a page.

2. Usability Improvements

• New Wiki Dashboard on the home page:
  • Spaces: all the spaces within your wiki (technical spaces are hidden):
    • Links to the list of pages within each spaces.
    • Links to the administration of each space.
    • Allows to create new spaces.
  • Tags: all the tags in the wiki under the form of a tag cloud.
  • Recent changes: all the recent modifications in the wiki, grouped by author and by date.
    
    * New way of displaying tags, with 2 new features:
  • Tag rename.
  • Tag delete.
    
    * Improved information section in document footer, including document children:
    
    

3. Performance Improvements

• Page loading time reduced by 30%. Statistics on Sandbox.WebHome, without client-side file caching (most of the downloaded files are cached on the client after the first request):{table}

• | XE 1.8M1 | XE 1.8M2

  Requests number | 37 | 25 Total size | 332Ko | 200Ko Download @ T1 (seconds) | 9.16 | 6.06 {table}

• Improved authentication performance for LDAP. By default the authentication system now calls the authenticator only once by session, this means it does not call the LDAP authenticator and does not generate queries on the LDAP server for each request anymore. This can be changed using the

4. Translations

• Most default applications have been internationalized. Some work remain for the Blog and Watchlist application to be performed in 1.8.x.
• New or improved translations for the UI:
  • French
  • German
  • Spanish

5. Office Importer

• New Office Importer: makes use of a running OpenOffice server to convert Office documents (MS Office or OO) into HTML before they are transformed into XWiki 2.0 syntax

  

6. REST API

• New REST API. Currently implemented:
  • Access to wikis, spaces and pages
  • Access to page history, translations and page children
  • Access to tags, comments, objects and classes in general
  • Access to attachments

7 New Blog Application

• New Blog application
  • Lightweight publishing workflow
  • Category and sub-category support
  • Ability to change published date
  • Panels to display blog categories and unpublished posts

8. Others

• Upgrade to Groovy 1.6 final.
• Important bugs fixed
  • Scaled images in exported PDF and RTF have wrong dimensions
  • When a wiki is removed, it's not removed form the cache
  • Including a document with first or second heading level breaks the including document section edit link
  • PDF export does not take into account the encoding specified in xwiki.cfg

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.

Applications migration

XE 1.8M2 has introduced conditional loading of JavaScript and StyleSheet files in order for pages to load faster, sending to the browser only the files it needs to display the requested pages. This might break existing applications developed on top of XWiki that relied on such JavaScript and CSS files being present all the time. Concerned files and libraries are the following:

• scriptaculous files
• accordions files
• chart wizard files
• usersandgroups.js and usersandgroups.css
• livetable.js and livetable.css
• lightbox.js
• tablefilterNsort.js and table.css
• fullscreenEdit.js and fullscreenEdit.css

If you have applications that relies on one or several of these libraries, you will need to explicitly make them request the desired files using the Skin Extension plugin. For example, if your application needs the live-table feature (the dynamic AJAX grid), add the following lines to the code page that requires it: