Release Notes for XWiki 8.0 Release Candidate 1

Last modified by Thomas Mortagne on 2017/03/24

This is the release notes for XWiki Commons, XWiki Rendering, XWiki Platform and XWiki Enterprise. They share the same release notes as they are released together and have the same version.

This release candidate brings a couple of improvements, notably the ability to register a user from the Distribution Wizard and to auto-generate the main wiki descriptor at start up. The Chart Macro comes with new parameters and the UI for page rename/copy has better labels. On the technical side, this release brings the first, experimental, version of the minimalistic XWiki distribution.

New and Noteworthy (since XWiki 8.0 Milestone 2)

Full list of issues fixed and Dashboard for 8.0.

New XWiki distribution

The work on a new as small as possible distribution of XWiki has started. The key goal is to try to have a WAR as small as possible on which you install one of the Flavors automatically found in the registered repositories (meaning http://extensions.xwiki.org/ for now).

The size is still not very far from XE (188M compared to the 219M XE), one important limitation is that we kept some old plugins because they are hard to install as extensions (you need to modify xwiki.cfg and restart). We need to convert them to proper components so that we can move them to contrib as "pure" extensions.

There is still two important known limitation in that version that we hope to have in 8.0 final or 8.1 at worst:

  • make flavors search in the Distribution Wizard asynchronous, the step is blocked for a long time right now which is not very nice
  • support upgrade of invalid flavor (search for a valid replacement in that case)

It's still experimental and should be avoided in production but the move has started and we are very excited by the new opportunity this will bring!

Custom admin user to replace standard Admin user

Since XWiki exists you got a user Admin with password admin in the default XAR. This time is now gone and you are now asked to register your own user which will be the owner of the wiki (meaning whatever you do you can't loose admin right on it, unless you change the owner) when you install XWiki from scratch. We kept a standard Admin user for the all in one jetty/hsqldb package so the change won't be visible in this one.

newwelcome.png

customuser.png

Automatically generated main wiki descriptor

The XE XAR does not contain any descriptor for the main wiki anymore. This descriptor is now automatically created/updated at start and associated to the domain name found in the URL that was used to access the wiki the first time.

Chart Macro Additions

There are several new parameters that can now be set when using the Chart Macro:

Parameter nameDefault valueDescription
backgroundColorGrey backgroundBackground color of the non-chart area, specified using an hexadecimal notation, e.g. FFAACC (first 2 letters are for Red, following 2 are for Green and last 2 are for Blue).
plotBackgroundColorWhiteBackground color of the plot area, specified using an hexadecimal notation (see backgroundColor).
plotBorderColorBlackColor of the plot border, specified using an hexadecimal notation (see backgroundColor).
borderColorBlackColor of the outer graph border, specified using an hexadecimal notation (see backgroundColor).
legendBackgroundColorWhiteBackground color of the legend box, specified using an hexadecimal notation (see backgroundColor).
plotBorderVisibletrueWhether the border for the plot area is visible or not. Valid values are true and false.
legendVisibletrueWhether the legend is displayed or not. Valid values are true and false.

Examples:

  • Pie chart with no legend displayed, no border, no title and white background:
    {{chart type="pie" source="inline" params="range:B2-D5;series:columns;backgroundColor:FFFFFF;plotBackgroundColor:FFFFFF;plotBorderVisible:false;legendVisible:false" width="320" height="240"}}
    |=|=X|=Y|=Z
    |Q1|1.2|3.4|1.3
    |Q2|4.5|3.4|2.3
    |Q3|1.2|4.5|9.0
    |Q4|3.4|1.2|1.2
    {{/chart}}

    pieChartWhite.png

  • Colored background:
    {{chart type="pie" source="inline" params="range:B2-D5;series:columns;backgroundColor:FFFF11;plotBackgroundColor:11FFFF" title="Chart Test" width="320" height="240"}}
    |=|=X|=Y|=Z
    |Q1|1.2|3.4|1.3
    |Q2|4.5|3.4|2.3
    |Q3|1.2|4.5|9.0
    |Q4|3.4|1.2|1.2
    {{/chart}}

    pieChartColor.png

In addition, it's now possible to perform advanced customization of the generated chart.

Rename and Copy UI

  • Updated the rename page UI's field labels and descriptions to mention that the update links also updates the relative links inside the renamed page and not just the backlinks. Also moved the count displays from the field label to the field's description, where applicable, in both the rename and the copy UI, for better UI consistency.

    renameRewording-Step1.png

    copyRewording-Step1.png

  • The copy and rename UI now have the children and links options checked by default. We believe it`s better to preserve data consistency by default, even with the cost o having to go through lengthy operations (like when renaming a document with many children).

Miscellaneous

  • main wiki owner now have programming rights and not only admin rights

See the full list of JIRA issues fixed in this release.

For Developers

Upgrades

The following dependencies have been upgraded:

Miscellaneous

Translations

The following translations have been updated: 

Tested Browsers & Databases

Here is the list of browsers we support and how they have been tested for this release:

BrowserTest Result
Chrome30.pngGoogle Chrome 49Not Tested
Firefox30.pngMozilla Firefox 43Not Tested
IE30.pngInternet Explorer 10Not Tested
IE30.pngInternet Explorer 11Jira Tickets Marked as Fixed in the Release Notes

Here is the list of databases we support and how they have been tested for this release:

DatabaseTest Result
hypersql.pngHyperSQL 2.3.3Not Tested
mysql.pngMySQL 5.7.11Jira Tickets Marked as Fixed in the Release Notes
oracle.pngOracle 11.2Not Tested
postgresql.pngPostgreSQL 9.5Not Tested

Known issues

Backward Compatibility and Migration Notes

General Notes

When upgrading make sure you compare your xwiki.cfg, xwiki.properties and web.xml files with the newest version since some configuration parameters may have been modified or added. Note that you should add xwiki.store.migration=1 so that XWiki will attempt to automatically migrate your current database to the new schema. Make sure you backup your Database before doing anything.

API Breakages

The following APIs were modified since XWiki 7.4.2:

  • Allow associating a version different from the extension version to the features and allow indicating namespace constraint in an extension
    org.xwiki.extension.Extension: Method 'public java.util.Collection getAllowedNamespaces()' has been added to an interface
    org.xwiki.extension.Extension: Method 'public org.xwiki.extension.ExtensionId getExtensionFeature(java.lang.String)' has been added to an interface
    org.xwiki.extension.Extension: Method 'public java.util.Collection getExtensionFeatures()' has been added to an interface
  • Deprecating this class in favor of the standard library class with the same name
    org.xwiki.velocity.introspection.AbstractChainableUberspector: Removed field inner
    org.xwiki.velocity.introspection.DeprecatedCheckUberspector: Removed org.xwiki.velocity.introspection.ChainableUberspector from the set of implemented interface
    org.xwiki.velocity.introspection.DeprecatedCheckUberspector: Removed org.xwiki.velocity.introspection.AbstractChainableUberspector from the list of superclasse
    org.xwiki.velocity.introspection.MethodArgumentsUberspector: Removed org.xwiki.velocity.introspection.ChainableUberspector from the set of implemented interface
    org.xwiki.velocity.introspection.MethodArgumentsUberspector: Removed org.xwiki.velocity.introspection.AbstractChainableUberspector from the list of superclasse
  • Young API. Better name
    org.xwiki.platform.flavor.FlavorManager: Method 'public org.xwiki.extension.repository.result.IterableResult searchFlavors(org.xwiki.platform.flavor.FlavorQuery)' has been added to an interface
  • Not really a breackage. Just moved to its own module.
    com.xpn.xwiki.plugin.diff.DiffPlugin: Class com.xpn.xwiki.plugin.diff.DiffPlugin removed
    com.xpn.xwiki.plugin.diff.DiffPluginApi: Class com.xpn.xwiki.plugin.diff.DiffPluginApi removed
  • Removed constant that shouldn't have been there
    org.xwiki.chart.ChartGenerator: Field COLORS_PARAM has been removed, but it was previously a constant
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