Testing against the latest milestone release of Confluence 2.8, it's clear that swathes of plugins are going to need to be re-released to handle the changes..
As with any plugin architecture, plugins are dependant upon the API of the parent application. With each point release (2.3, 2.4, 2.5, etc) of Confluence, the API changes, but usually only a little.
Confluence 2.8, however, is one of those releases where the changes are pretty big and widespread, especially for the larger plugins. Many classes no longer exist and have been replaced by completely new classes so plugin developers will have their work cut out for them.
That being said, Confluence 2.8 is a great step forward and the milestone releases are proving invaluable to detect the compatibility issues sooner rather than later.
It's not yet known when 2.8 will be formally released, but due to the nature of some of the changes I dare say it's going to be a few months before the more complex plugins catch up. In short, if you use lots of plugins (especially those that are cluster-aware), don't go upgrading your production environment to 2.8 the day it's released!
2008/03/07
