Recent posts from Per Fragemann

We are pleased to announce the release of Confluence 3.0 Open Beta2 today, and invite you to register and download the Beta, and provide detailed feedback to us while you are testing the new features mentioned below. Please note that this Beta is for testing purposes only, and should NOT be installed on production systems.

What's new in Confluence 3.0?

Macro Browser

The new macro browser exposes hundreds of page editing capabilities --- charts, tasklists, photo galleries, RSS feeds and more --- through a point-and-click graphical interface.

New Community Features for improved sharing of content

• Status Updates: users can post a 140-character message to share links, ask questions or simply tell co-workers what they're up to
• Personal Networks: users can build a personal network by following other users in the system
• Activity Streams: users can view all the activity happening within their network including page edits, blog posts, comments and status updates
• Hover Profile: users can hover over a user's name wherever it appears in Confluence to follow the user, navigate to their personal space or view summary profile information
• Improved Personal Spaces: each user's personal space now includes a collapsible side panel that shows detailed profile information such as current status and recent activities

More Improvements

• Improved PDF export: PDF export has been vastly improved so that the exported PDF more closely resembles the content in the page
• Context Menu: users can edit links, images and tables by right clicking into the rich text editor
• Notification improvements: email notifications for page edits show what changed in the edit
• Performance improvements: Clustered performance has been improved by a factor of 2 in our testing environment, standalone Confluence has improved by 30% and makes better use of powerful hardware.

Where do I download it?

Please follow this link to download the Beta release

I do not have time to download and install the Beta, is there a public instance already set up that I can test?

• You can view people's profiles, start following them, and so on, on our public documentation server
• To try out the new Macro Browser, the PDF export, and updating your status, please visit our sandbox space

Where do I get release notes and screenshots for the Beta?

Our official release notes for Confluence 3.0 will be shipped on the day of the final release. In the meantime, we provide brief overviews on our Beta discussion forums, and if you'd like to know more about the details of the features and how they evolved, you can have a look at our fortnightly announcements that were provided over the course of the release cycle.

How do I provide feedback?

There are three main ways to provide feedback:
* For general feedback, please visit our Confluence 3 Beta Discussion site
* If you encounter a bug, please create a new issue in our public JIRA instance for Confluence. Be sure to select an "affects version" of 3.0-beta2.
* If you'd like to speak to us in person, drop us a mail. Depending on the topic of your comment, someone from our development team or from the product management team will get in touch.

Can I get support for this release?

No, there is no Atlassian Support available for this release. Please log bugs, issues or feature requests in our public JIRA installation and be sure to select Confluence, affects version 3.0-beta2.

How Long will the Beta last?

The Beta will last approximately 2 weeks, ending on June 1, 2009.

We look forward to hearing from you on results of your beta testing. If you have any questions, please send email to confluence3-beta@atlassian.com

Last Friday the Sydney-based Confluence team headed out to world famous IT-suburb Manly for a one-day workshop to learn more about advanced JavaScript and JQuery, the JavaScript-library that Confluence will standardize upon. Obviously it was pure coincidence that the weather was fine, the coffee great and the beers cold, and we were positively surprised to find out that a nice beach was just across the road...

Upon arrival in Manly, Dmitry, our revered JavaScrip-guru and general CSS&Typography fanatic introduced us to the wonderful world of Script-Craft, which included closures, prototypes and loose typing. Being hardcore backend Java-developers didn't exactly give us a big advantage here — our heads were spinning, but we did pretty well on the exercises. Or so we think. Would you know how to:

Add to any number the function "times" which will run some function N times.
(5).times(function () {alert(this);}); 


Click here for the full set of tasks [PDF]

The original plan was to squeeze in 6.5 hours of presentations and exercises on JQuery, but to be honest, we only got to 5 hours. Let me explain: I blame the weather! Huge clouds were beginning to show on the horizon, so we ditched our plans (agile!) and hit the beach right after lunch. When we returned to lessons, our energy levels were quite low after that, so after Matt's presentation of JQuery, and another hour of exercises we called it a day, and headed straight for a cold beer in a nearby bar.

Photos!

In the morning, everyone was still looking forward to a nice day on the beach. Little did they know of what was ahead...

... like Dmitry talking about Loose Typing in JavaScript. Yuck! :-)

Never has the Confluence team worked as focussed as this. From left to right: Andrew, Agnes, Anatoli, Adnan (yeah, we try to hire mainly A-players), Don, Dave and Chris.

Matt talks on JQuery. The crowd pretends to understand it.

Matthew and Adnan walking down the esplanade, probably discussing the intricacies of product management.

Parts of the Confluence team returning from the surf. From left to right: Don, Andrew, Dave, Matthew and Anatoli.

David got the shortest straw and had to pair with Per. Per does what he is best at, and delegates all the hard work back to David.

Chris and Anatoli working on JQuery tasks

Next steps

I heard plenty of "when will we do this again?" We will aim at doing the next workshop in three months. I would suggest other teams try something similar as well. The planning overhead is smaller than it seems, especially if you have regular internal training every week anyway, and in the end we spent around $40 per person for the whole day — not much more than what we spend on our regular infamous post-release lunches.