Confluence Upgrade 5.8.10 to 6.4.3

Owned by Michael Oatley
Last updated: Jan 12, 2018
2 min read

Link to upgrade matrix

Important Notes:

It's the dashboard, but not as you know it

Confluence 5.9 sports a brand new dashboard, with a collapsible sidebar that makes getting around a breeze. 

 

Just like in the old dashboard, you can watch the action unfold in real time with All updates, or check out the pages with lots of activity and buzz in the Popular feed. 

 

  • Collaborative editing!

    Multiple users can concurrently edit a page together. Changes are automatically saved so that unpublished work is always available.

  • Atlassian Team Playbook blueprints: create health monitors, DACIs, project posters, and more

Discontinued or deprecated features

Status updates

In our quest to simplify your Confluence experience, we have removed the Status Updates feature in Confluence 5.9. This includes the ability to:

  • update your status
  • see other people's status via their profile or the User Status List macro.

If you think you might be using the User Status List macro on any pages in your site you might want to remove them before upgrading. After the upgrade these macros will show as 'unknown macro'.

Deprecated macros for Confluence (13 November 2015)

With the release of Confluence 5.9 we will be ending support for the following macros, known collectively as the 'View File' macros:

  • Office Excel
  • Office Word
  • Office PowerPoint
  • PDF

End of support means that Atlassian will not fix bugs related to these macros past the support end date for your version of Confluence. We plan to remove these macros in a future Confluence release, and will provide plenty of information to help you make the transition when the time comes.

The View File macros will still be available in future Confluence releases (including Confluence 5.9, 5.10 and later), but we recommend inserting Office and PDF files as a thumbnail or link, and using the preview to view the file in full, as it provides a much better way to display Office and PDF files on your pages. See Display Files and Images  for more info.

If you have any questions or concerns, please comment on this issue CONFSERVER-39829- Plans to remove the view file macros Open

Documentation theme

In order to better focus our development efforts on a single theme, we plan to remove the Documentation theme in Confluence 6.0.

We know that many customers use the Documentation theme because they like to have a page tree in their space sidebar. This has been available in the default theme for some time now, plus other great features like sidebar shortcuts, JIRA links, and sticky table headers.

To help you switch to the more modern default theme, we've added some of your favorite documentation theme features, including the ability to add:

  • a header and footer
  • custom content to the sidebar.

These new additions to the default theme are available in Confluence 5.9. As these fields will continue to use wiki markup, you will be able to drop your existing wiki markup straight from the Documentation theme into the default theme.

To help you switch themes we've put together a step-by-step guide  which covers everything from how to turn on the default theme, find out which spaces are using the theme, and what to do if the Documentation theme is the global theme for your whole site.Â