Today marks an important milestone in the history of Communardo Products: our oldest (active) add-on in the Atlassian Marketplace gets fresh paint in form of a major update. In this blog post I’ll walk you through the most important changes and show how they might impact your Confluence instance.
First of all, please allow me to give you a quick recap of the history of this product in order to show its importance for Communardo Products:
Now as you can see there’s quite some heritage attached to the add-on so let’s take a look into what is new…
Now what’s new in SubSpace Navigation for Confluence 3.0?
You may have noticed that the add-on received a new name and a fresh looking logo. Besides those optical changes, the whole product has been rebuild from scratch. This leads to a broad variety of changes and I’m going to highlight the most important ones below.
Look and feel, User Experience
Starting all over again gave us the opportunity to rebuild the UI in order to better align with the design of Confluence. This affects both the end user elements as well as the administration interface. Besides this, we also introduced a lot of usability improvements.
CQL
By using the CQL option in the navigation, powerful personalization is possible. Please refer to the full documentation and find a few examples below:
- List recently created pages for the current logged in user:
contributor = currentUser() AND type IN("page", "blogpost") ORDER BY created DESC - List the favoutrite pages and blogposts of the current logged in user:
favourite = currentUser()
Theming
Absolutely right! You can theme the navigation just like you would paint a wall of your house. Well at least it is as simple. The only tool you need is the add-on CUTE for Confluence.
Having CUTE enabled, you will instantly find a new (yet still not activated) theme that is available within your Confluence: just head to the overview page for all your CUTE extensions in the Confluence Administration.
If you are already using the CUTE add-on, the extensions should be present right now. It’s that easy!
If you are using CUTE prior to version 1.4 (which is scheduled for later this year) you may need to either deactivate and activate CUTE in the Universal Plugin Manager or restart your Confluence in order to see the provided CUTE Extension.
Of course the bundled CUTE Extension can be modified to your liking, or you can simply create an own theme for your navigation within CUTE.
Other Changes
The add-on is now Data Center compatible. We received reports from some customers that SubSpace 2.x worked quite well in Data Center environments but this was never confirmed by our QA or Dev Departments. Not anymore 😉
Starting with version 3.0, the add-on will also be covered by our regular support. To learn more about what is included in our product support please have a look into our support portal. In addition to that both performance and security issues could be resolved.
For a full list of changes refer to the official product documentation.
Architectural Changes
The decision to start all over with the add-on was mainly inspired by the underlying architecture that was a bit dated. With SubSpace being our oldest add-on it is no surprise that mistakes of the past were quite limiting in future development. This is where some of the security related issues were originating in.
If you are using a previous version of SubSpace the existing structure and navigation will be migrated automatically. So besides a fresh new look nothing should change for your end users.
As part the overhaul, we also made the decision to exclude the SubSpace macros for now. We have been in active contact with many customers and the overall feedback was that navigation is the primary use case they are addressing the product right now. If the need arises we might re-introduce macros for the add-on. So if you are really missing this, please do not hesitate to contact our support – we may even find a workaround for specific issues.
A word about the Pricing
Starting with version 3.0 SubSpace Navigation for Confluence will be released under a commercial license accompanied by commercial pricing. This was not an easy decision to be made on our side though we felt this is the best what could happen to the add-on. The change in pricing will allow us to ensure further inventions in the add-on as well as providing the support many of you know already from our other Atlassian add-ons.
To make the transition easier for you we are offering a 100% voucher to all existing customers of the SubSpace Plugin until the End of January 2017. In order to receive your voucher, please contact our support team.
Most customers were not aware of this: all previous versions of SubSpace were in fact Open Source and are as such still available for download via the Atlassian Marketplace. You can also download the source code directly in our Support Portal.
Final words
As you can see we as Communardo Products are pretty excited about the new release! Actually we can’t await your feedback on the new features of the add-on. If you like what you see can of course always add a review at the Atlassian Marketplace so other can benefit from your experience.
