The highlights of this release are: the ability to annotate text in a document, a Color Theme visual editor and the ability to require anonymous users to solve a CAPTCHA before adding a comment to a document.

New and Noteworthy (since XWiki Enterprise 2.2.5)

Annotations

The scope of this feature is to allow users to annotate text in a XWiki document. With the new feature you can:

• Make annotations by selecting the text and pressing Ctrl + M (Meta + M)

  

• Show annotations on your page

  

• See an annotation for a text item by hovering over the yellow icon next to it

  

• Edit and delete annotations straight from the page

  

• Manage annotations from the "Annotations" tab

  

You can find a more detailed description of the annotations feature on the documentation page.

Color Theme Editor

The new editor allows fast and easy modifications for the look and feel of the wiki. You'll find in this editor 

• A new way of displaying themes on the "Color Themes" space home

  

• The ability to create a new theme from the "Color Theme" space home

  

• A palette for each area you are editing with a popup listing everything you can customize at this level

  

• A dialog where you can make the desired changes

  

• The possibility to undo the latest modifications or reset all changes

Read more about Color Themes on the dedicated application page.

Anonymous commenting with Captcha

Now thanks to the captcha module you can require unregistered users to solve a captcha in order to post comments. To require guests to solve a captcha simply go to the "Rights" section of the Administration Application for the wiki or just the space, and check the box saying "Require unregistered users to solve a captcha when posting a comment on a page". Note This box does not give guests permission to comment, it only adds a requirement for commenting if they already have permission.
This feature is documented here.
Sample:

Easier development of configurable applications using XWiki.ConfigurableClass

If you are developing an application and you need to provide your users with a way to configure it from the Administration Application you are in luck. All you need to do is create a custom class holding all of the configuration for your application, then add an object of your custom configuration class and an object of XWiki.Configurable class. You will be able to configure your application from the administration interface.
The following is an image of the administration interface with additional applications to be configured (you can customize the icon used).

Note the current user does not have permission to edit one of the configurable applications.

Miscellaneous

• Email addresses can now be modified from the user profile
• Lots of bug fixes

Dependencies upgrade

• Upgrade to Pygments 1.3.1
• Upgrade to Groovy 1.7.2

Known issues

• Bugs we know about

Backward Compatibility and Migration Notes

Important non-compatible changes

General Notes

You may also want to import the default wiki XAR in order to benefit from the improvements listed above. In case you don't want to reimport all the pages at least the following pages should be imported (+ the pages listed below in the Migration notes):

• Main.WebSearch
• Main.LuceneSearch
• XWiki.LiveTableResults*
• Blog.* (except the Blog.WebPreferences if you've made some changes to it. You can also exclude Blog.BlogIntroduction)

Migration Notes

• Standalone/inline Macro parsing has been fixed.

  There has been a bug that appeared when we released the new XWiki Syntax 2.0 several releases back and which we've finally fixed in this release. Basically if you had a macro followed by a new line and then another macro, both macros were considered as being standalone. This is now fixed and they are correctly considered by the parser as inline. More specifically if you were previously using a standalone macro (such as the TOC macro or the HTML macro) and your macro wasn't separated from a previous macro by at least 2 new lines, it'll now fail to render.

  In addition, several pages that are part of the XWiki Enterprise default XAR were not written correctly and didn't have these 2 new lines as mentioned above. We've fixed these pages too but you'll need to make sure you import them in your existing wiki (if you're upgrading) since otherwise these pages will fail to display correctly. These pages are:

  • Main.RecentChanges
  • Main.AllDocs
  • XWiki.Tableview
  • XWiki.Treeview
  • XWiki.AllAttachments
  • XWiki.OrphanedPages
  • XWiki.DeletedDocuments
  • XWiki.DeletedAttachments
  • XWiki.XWikiUserPreferencesSheet
  • Sandbox.WebHome
• Header id generation changed a bit and more special characters are now allowed in id names: hyphens ("-"), underscores ("_"), colons (":"), and periods (".") are not filtered anymore. This means that some bookmarks will stop pointing to the right section.
• Non-parametrized searches containing backslashes (\) will no longer work on some databases (eg: HSQLDB). For security and to support special characters ' and \ it is recommended that you pass strings as parameters.