This release contains many important UI improvements of existing features (xar import, user registration, comments, etc.), and introduces the new Model API starting with a new EntityReference and related tools to remove all String manipulations around documents and attachment names.

New and Noteworthy (since XWiki Enterprise 2.1.2)

New XAR Import UI

The XAR import interface has been completely revamped. The new interface (see screenshots below) now provides:

• More explicit options regarding revision history handling
• The new option to add a new version to existing documents instead of overriding them
• A rich UI that allows to select/unselect whole spaces at once
• Support for importing when no javascript is available. The UI degrades nicely to a less rich interface

UI for Deleted documents & attachments

While deleted documents and attachments have been stored in a trash instead of being completely deleted since XWiki 1.2, there was no general interface for viewing the contents of the trash. This has been remedied by the introduction of two new tabs in the wiki's Document Index, Deleted Documents and Deleted Attachments.

Both use the livetable, thus allowing filtering and ordering for easier browsing. A document from the trash can be viewed, permanently deleted, or restored if the location is still available.

The attachment trash contains only attachments deleted from a document, and not attachments that were deleted together with their owner document; in the latter case, the attachments are kept together with the document in the document trash. For attachments, there is no restore option yet, it will be implemented in a future release.

New Profile & WatchList UI

Complete overhaul of the Profile UI: better display of the user information, recent changes by the user are shown, different tabs for user details, user settings, and watchlist information:

Improved inline-based editing for modifying profile details:

Inclusion of the WatchList manager page into the Profile as a tab:

Added a tab in the Profile for managing user preferences, which is currently rather small, but will be improved later to include more settings:

User profiles have been converted to XWiki Syntax 2.0

New Registration page, new CAPTCHA implementation

The new features are:

• Ability to display a CAPTCHA for spam prevention. Note that by default the CAPTCHA test is disabled, it must be enabled in xwiki.properties.
• All fields are checked by client-side script as the user types, then checked by the server for security.

  The default minimum password size is now 6 characters.

• One-click login after registration.

  

• Easy for administrators to add new fields, configuration with code.
• The registration page can be imported/edited without programming rights, allowing easier customization of the registration in a wiki farm
• Works on older wikis if LiveValidation is imported (CAPTCHA won't appear)

New Menu in Edit mode

The different edition modes that used to be in a separate Panel are now in a new edit menu (similarly to the menu you get in view mode).

Comments UI improvements

Preview comment

The users have the possibility to preview their comment before submitting it. A current known limitation is that the preview does not work for unauthenticated users.

Edit comment

The users have the possibility to edit their comments. This only works for authenticated users, since there is no way of knowing which unauthenticated user created a guest comment.

WYSIWYG and Rendering improvements

• Add API to find the syntax of the executing document from scripts
• Macro descriptions can now be translated

  

  

General UI improvements

• In the wiki source code viewer, allow to toggle line numbers faster from Javascript
• Enable full screen view when displaying the wiki source code (viewer=code)
• ActionMenu: Add Profile submenu item to the "current user" menu

  

• Reorder the document actions in the "More actions" menu: copy, rename, delete

  

• More UI components make use of the (recently introduced) color theme
• All panels have nice readable names
• Allow to copy a document's default language + all translations in the copy menu action

  

Contextual wiki macros

Previously, wiki macros could only be defined by users with administrator rights, and only in the main wiki (when in a virtual wiki farm). It's now possible for any user to register wiki macros, and in any wiki. However, this follows some user rights restrictions, preventing a limited user to write dangerous scripts available to all other users. For example, if the user does not have the proper rights, only he will see and use the macro he registered. To make the macro available globally, an administrator must re-save it.

New Model module with Reference implementation

The goal is to provide APIs to remove all String manipulations around documents and attachment names. It also introduces the concept of Reference for any entity of the model and the parser/serializer associated. For now Wiki, Space, Document and attachment are supported; classes objects and properties should come in 2.3 branch.

From a user point of view this will result in supporting any character in document names for example. In addition, this is also a step in the direction of supporting nested spaces (the storage would also need to be changed to support that).

In practice the existing code has not yet been fully refactored to benefit from the new implementation. The work has been started in XWiki Enterprise 2.2 Milestone 1 and will continue in XWiki Enterprise 2.3 and beyond.

Development improvements

• Added support for "xcontext" binding in 1.0 groovy macro
• Allow set to null in velocity
• Add an API method for creating a LinkedHashMap
• New APIs for accessing deleted attachments from the trash
• The class wizard should propose to add a SheetClass object to the class sheet
• Add support for 'on page' style extensions

Office import improvements

• Added support for Office2007 document formats

Blog improvement

• Added the Create a new post to category pages - when used by default select that category

Dependencies upgrade

• Upgraded to Groovy 1.7
• Upgrade to GWT 2.0.0

Miscellaneous

• Always use UTF-8 for URL encoding
• Attachments should produce document modification events
• New user profile pages are created in XWiki Syntax 2.0
• New zh_TW translation

• Lots of accessibility fixes
• Lots of bug fixes

Known issues

• Bugs we know about

Backward Compatibility and Migration Notes

Important non-compatible changes

This means that the following script will generate a different result:

While previously the result would have been abc abc, now it is abc $s.

Special care must be taken care with constructs like the following:

Since null != '' in Velocity, now a different branch will be executed. The following rewrites work.

Works in both modes, with or without null allowed:
#set($var = '')
#set($var = $xwiki.methodThatMightReturnNull())
#if("$!var" != '')
  The method succeeded
#else
  The method failed
#end

Works only in the new mode, with null allowed, but is shorter, slightly faster, and more familiar for java developers:
#set($var = $xwiki.methodThatMightReturnNull())
#if($!var != $util.null)
  The method succeeded
#else
  The method failed
#end

Captcha

Captcha related configuration changed in Struts configuration file. If you keep the old file it will fail silently so make sure to use the proper configuration you can find in the new file (or overwrite it if you don't have any local modification obviously).

Removed pages

• Main.RecentMembers has been removed from default XWiki Enterprise xar

General Notes

You may also want to import the default wiki XAR in order to benefit from the improvements listed above.

Migration Notes

• The new parser/serializer for document names comes with new features and changes some behaviors:
  • introducing escaping means:
    • \ which is now the escaping character needs to be doubled in full document name, as in Space.Docu\\ment, which means space Space and document Docu\\ment
    • some generated documents names will now contains \ to escape thing like dot in a document name. For example Space.Docu\.ment means space Space and document Docu.ment
  • support for the syntax wikiname:Document has been dropped, so in this example "wikiname:Document" will be seen as the document name because no . has been found
• If you had Wiki Macros defined in your wiki before, you might want to edit them to check their visibility field since the notion of visibility was introduced in XE 2.2 and the default value is user-visibility.
• CoreConguration#getSyntax now returns a Syntax object instead of a String

Dependencies

This release includes the following modules in the specified versions since XWiki Enterprise 2.1.2 was released.

Core/Web

Applications

Plugins

Skins

Top Level POM

Tools