Atlassian Confluence 5 - Towards the Ideal

A few days before the spring, Atlassian ’s product line is large and, most importantly, a long-awaited event: there was a release of Confluence 5 with tangible changes in the user interface and a huge number of new features. Under the cat review of the capabilities of Confluence 5 with a number of pictures and a large number of links.

CEO Atlassian tells us that they have worked hard on Confluence 5

In recent years, Atlassian has headed for the unification of the appearance of its products. About six months ago, they updated the interface of their cloud-based OnDemand applications, and a few months ago , the appearance of Atlassian Bitbucket , a service for hosting source code on Git and Mercurial, GitHub's main competitor. Now came the turn and standalone version of Confluence.

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The new user interface is implemented using the Atlassian AUI (Atlassian User Interface) library, which was released from the walls, examples of which are presented here , and you can play with it in a special sandbox . Since this library is released under the Apache 2.0 license, you can use it in any of your projects if you wish.

A big and long-awaited feature was the ability to switch between the various applications used in your company using Application Navigator . Particularly impatient developers have already created a plugin with this functionality, but now it is available out of the box.

Gradually, Confluence is turning from a tool for techies to a working tool for blondes of people who do not have a technical mindset. One of the improvements in this direction was the “wizard” for creating new pages, called Blueprint. With Blueprint, you can easily and conveniently create pages from templates, as well as add new content sources for your corporate wiki using plugins (for example, create new pages directly from your Evernote notes)

One of the very interesting and visual features is the automatic selection of the color scheme of your wiki when loading a company logo.

The bright side of the Force

The dark side of the Force

And finally, I would like to note that the comrades from Atlassian decided, step by step, to get rid of a large number of topics supported in Confluence. Starting with Confluence 5, the Easy Reader Theme has been completely removed , and in the next versions there will probably be only one topic, which, according to the developers, will include all the best of the previously existing topics.

Of the remaining innovations and changes of the 5th version of Confluence, it is worth considering:

• Confluence now officially supports only Java 7 (as you know, more recently, Oracle also does not support Java 6)
• switching to edit mode in the Global Look and Feel theme no longer requires reloading the page
• Now you can search for recently viewed pages in a separate window that can be accessed from the menu.
• finally, it is possible to export not only pages to PDF, but also posts from blogs
• In the view mode, if someone edited the contents of the current page or added a comment, you will learn about it from an unobtrusive pop-up notification.
• Now you can delete a specific revision of the page (the most expected feature from the tracker, judging by the number of votes it has gained)

And finally, the video from Atlassian, which must surely convince you that the new Confluence 5 is the wiki you need.

Despite the fact that Confluence still has room to grow, we have to admit that with each new release, this wiki-system becomes noticeably better, increasingly distracting from competitors. As you know, there are no perfect products, but for the desire to make a perfect product I want to express gratitude to the guys from Atlassian.