8 February 2024

We're excited to present Confluence 8.8

This Confluence release supports only Data Center licenses. If you have a Server license, check out your options for upgrading.

Highlights

• Delete multiple attachments at once
• New REST APIs to make content management easier
• Say ‘G0oD8y3’ to plaintext user directory server passwords
• Changes to app uploads via the Universal Plugin Manager
• The ATST app upgraded to 1.54.0 with new health checks
• New infrastructure metrics for in-product diagnostics
• More accessibility improvements
• Removal of rarely-used rendering methods in Confluence

 

Get the latest version

   

More

Read the upgrade notes for important info about this release and see the full list of issues resolved.  

Thanks for your feedback

More than 770 votes satisfied!

Delete multiple attachments at once

For: END USERS ADMINS

Deleting attachments one at a time is fine if your page only has a handful of attachments, but for organizations working with countless attachments on a page, it's manual and time-consuming. We’ve heard this feedback, and we're excited to add the ability to bulk delete attachments in this release.

With great power comes great responsibility, so for now, you can delete a maximum of 20 attachments at a time. You can also download the selected attachments.

Screenshot: New Delete button to bulk delete selected attachments.

New REST APIs to make content management easier

For: ADMINS

Access more REST APIs to help you automate, script, and scale the following content management tasks:

• update permissions for a page

• archive and restore spaces

See the REST API documentation for the new methods to use.

Say ‘G0oD8y3’ to plaintext user directory server passwords

For: ADMINS

Secret manager now includes support for user directory password encryption. When configuring user directories, the supplied server password will be automatically AES encrypted. For existing instances that have user directories already configured, passwords will be encrypted automatically upon upgrade to Confluence 8.8.0. Confluence will automatically generate encryption keys and store them in the keys directory. The directory is not included in site exports, so you must manually back up this directory. To locate it, look in:

• the shared home directory for clustered instances

• the local home directory for single-node instances

See Backup and Restore for more information.

Changes to app uploads via the Universal Plugin Manager

For: ADMINS

To enhance security, we’ve changed how Data Center products, including Confluence, handle app installation through the Universal Plugin Manager (UPM) and REST APIs. The Upload App button of UPM is now disabled by default. System admins can still enable app installation via two possible workarounds:

1. Re-enable the UI upload button and API. Setting the system property upm.plugin.upload.enabled to true. For security reasons, do not leave this setting on permanently. We recommend turning it off once plugin upload is complete.

2. Load custom plugins from your Confluence file system. Set the system property atlassian.confluence.plugin.scan.directory to a target location of your custom plugins, which will be loaded into the system upon restart. We recommend a directory within the Confluence home directory, such as $CONFLUENCE_HOME/plugins/installed-plugins. Make sure you restart Confluence after setting this property.
   **If you run a Confluence cluster, a rolling restart is enough to pick up the configuration properties you set to enable the features.

This change doesn’t affect the installation of apps from the Atlassian Marketplace. Note that the UPM upload option is still enabled for instances running in dev mode. 

The ATST app upgraded to 1.54.0 with new health checks

For: ADMINS

The Atlassian Troubleshooting and Support app (ATST) has been upgraded to version 1.54.0, and will be available by default in Confluence Data Center 8.8. Checks include:

• Synchrony connectivity

• mail error queue

• user directories

If you’re using Confluence 8.7 or earlier, you can still upgrade the ATST app to 1.54.0 manually through Atlassian Marketplace and start using the newest health checks right away.

New infrastructure metrics for in-product diagnostics

For: ADMINS

We’re adding a number of new metrics for monitoring the health and performance of your instance infrastructure:

• outgoing and incoming mail servers

• user directories

• shared and local home directories

• node communication

• Synchrony connectivity

Learn more about the new infrastructure metrics

More accessibility improvements

For: END USERS

We've continued to focus on remediating critical accessibility issues and upgrading to the latest Atlassian User interface (AUI), providing improvements for screen reader and keyboard users across Team Calendars, the space sidebar, the editor toolbar, avatars, dropdown menus, inline comments and more!

See the list of resolved tickets for further information.

Removal of rarely-used rendering methods in Confluence

For: ADMINS

This release required the unplanned removal of a number of rarely-used rendering methods. In some very rare circumstances this may result in customer-developed plugins or user macros failing to render. If you encounter broken user macros after this upgrade, please contact Atlassian Support.

Resolved issues

For full details of bugs fixed and suggestions resolved, head to our public issues tracker on Jira.

---

Get ready to upgrade

Before you upgrade, check out the Confluence 8.8 upgrade notes for important changes in this release, then follow the usual upgrade instructions to upgrade your site.

Credits

Our wonderful customers... 

You play an important role in making Confluence better. Thanks to everyone who participated in interviews with us, made suggestions, voted, and reported bugs!