Rebranding
We want to introduce you Comala Share It for Confluence Server. New name, new logo but better add-on.
We are making the name and logo consistent with the rest of the Comalatech add-ons family. Share Attachments and Pages will now be known as Comala Share It for Confluence Server. All existing licenses are still valid, if you already have Share Attachments and Pages installed, the upgrade will be available through the Manage Add-ons page as normal.
Improvements
Share Attachments and Pages stored shared pages in cache, with all resources embedded on them. This gave faster load times than Confluence, but also many issues. Share It no longer caches html pages. This results in:
- Direct rendering instead of cache. There are not problems with browsers due to big embedded images. E.g., IE8 users accessing a shared page with "big" embedded 64 images didn't see them. Note that "big" in IE8 context means 32k (about 600x500).
- Same page load time than Confluence with a better server performance than Share Attachments and Pages.
- Very same look and feel than the original sharing page. All styles are kept!
- Blog post can now be shared. Previous version did not allow posts pages to be shared, with Share It you can share them too.
Attachments are no longer embedded in shared pages. Previous versions embedded everything (images, attachments, styles, js) within the shared page in base64. With this new version, attachments are no embedded anymore. Instead of that, the add-on generates a public link (like it is currently done with single attachments). This not only improves efficiency when creating public links of pages but also fixes a number of known errors.
Security
Only attachments and images that belong to the shared page are shown i.e., if a shared page contains an embedded page (using the include page for example), attachments belonging to the embedded page will not be shared. For sharing them, you have to go to that page and directly share them or the whole page.
Removals
We wanted to reduce unnecessary features for a better user experience. With that spirit, we have removed:
- The attachment lists at the bottom of all shared pages. If a user wants to share a list of attachments within a page, she can add the corresponding attachment list macro.
- Link behaviour. This was a rarely used feature, so now the browser will try to open the attachments in first place. If the browser doesn't know how, then, the user can download it to the computer.
- Social sharing. Many customers panicked when they saw it: Facebook and Twitter! We have removed sharing through those social networks, but remember that a public link is... public.
- Google URL shortener. The public (free) Google API was quite problematic, so we have removed it too.
- Page snapshots. We had observed that users wanted the current content of the page. For doing a page snapshot, you can always export (as pdf, html or word) your pages as documents.
User Interface Updates
We have improved the user interface to improve your experience. Since sharing a page is not a daily task, we did not want to clutter your pages. To share a page, go to the page menu, and click on "Share this Page..."
However, a shared page is something to be noted. So, we indicate as this new state with a visible "Shared" banner.
Bug Fixing
The Share It version fixes a number of issues:
- Java Heap Memory bug. This memory issue prevented pages with large or numerous attachments from being shared.
- Links Overview bug. Some shared links were not shown in the shared links overview screen.
- RefinedWiki bug. There was a problem with the Share Attachments and Pages button when using our add-on together with RefinedWiki themes.
- Cache Issue. Big shared pages and the flushing of caches caused problems on some instances.