Mini Confluence Blog

Mini Confluence Development Ending

2011-06-14T04:00:00Z

After much discussion and debate, we've decided to stop development of Mini Confluence. It's a solid product with over two years of development behind it, but the sales just don't justify our continued efforts. We've unfortunately spent far more developing it than we've ever made and sales trends do not foretell that reversing.

I feel badly about the inconvenience this is for our customers. A lot of people have found Mini Confluence to be the easiest way to use Confluence, especially for consuming and searching content. For those that have purchased licenses, they will continue to work though the remainder of your subscription period. We'll also soon release an update resolving several bugs we've fixed and will continue to resolve major issues for the remainder of everyone's license periods. However, the product will not support the forthcoming Confluence 4.0 release, which puts considerable constraints on what we're able to do with Mini Confluence (the summary of which has been written about at http://www.miniconfluence.com/blog/2011/04/12/editing_removed_for_confluence_4.html).

I truly appreciate the support from all of our existing customers and hope you've enjoyed using Mini Confluence.

Editing Removed for Confluence 4

2011-04-12T04:00:00Z

Confluence 4.0 is the next major release of Confluence, likely to debut at the 2011 Atlassian Summit this coming June 7th. Confluence 4 is a major release that brings an end to wiki markup. In Atlassian's document on Preparing for Confluence 4.0 they state that all editing will be done entirely through a new WYSIWYG editor.

In speaking with Atlassian, the new JavaScript-based WYSIWYG editor will not work on mobile web browsers. Unfortunately, developing our own specialized editor for Mini Confluence that could reasonably mimic Atlassian's is simply not feasible. However, Atlassian has promised to provide an API to convert wiki markup to their new XML format, but they will never store the wiki markup. This will allow us to create content but won't provide the ability to edit it.

Moving forward, Mini Confluence will retain all of the viewing, searching, and comment creation capabilities, but all editing will be removed. We'll also be removing page and blog post creation. While we could conceivably retain the ability to create pages and blog posts, the inability to edit this more lengthy content right after creating it seems strange and likely frustrating.

We've thought a lot about how to avoid removing editing capabilities, but without the ability to save content in wiki markup our options are extremely limited. When the Confluence WYSIWYG editor supports mobile browsers we will look into adding these features back in.

BlackBerry OS6 Now Supported

2011-03-29T04:00:00Z

The long awaited BlackBerry support is finally here. Beginning with version 1.1.2, Mini Confluence now supports BlackBerry OS6 phones through the web client. Fire up your BlackBerry browser and head to http://yourconfluence.com/mc to try it out.

Don't forget that you can request for an evaluation license to try things out before you buy.

Free Licenses of Mini Confluence Available

2011-03-01T05:00:00Z

Today we're announcing official support for several free license types. If your organization uses Confluence under one of the following license types, you can now use Mini Confluence for free!

Non-Profit / Open Source
Community
Open Source

Although these license types are free, the functionality is identical to our commercial and academic licenses. However, your installation of Confluence must have one of the above mentioned license types installed. It will not work otherwise.

Please visit the Mini Confluence product page to get started. The link to generate a free license can be found on the bottom of that page.

Academic Pricing Available

2011-02-22T05:00:00Z

Academic pricing is now available for Mini Confluence. It's 50% off the commercial prices across the board.

Functionality-wise, the academic plugin is exactly the same as the commercial plugin. In fact, there's only one plugin. The only thing different between the two is the license file.

Please note that a Mini Confluence academic license will only work on a Confluence installation that also has an academic license. It will not work with a Confluence server that has a commercial license installed.

You can find more information on pricing and how to purchase Mini Confluence on the product page.

Mini Confluence 1.1 Released

2010-12-09T05:00:00Z

Today we released version 1.1 of Mini Confluence, which includes a new release of the Confluence plugin and iPhone client. The new plugin is available immediately, while the iPhone client will likely be published to the App Store within a week or two. But, you won't get any of the new features without updating the plugin, so do that now.

iPhone/iOS Client Updates

We added one really cool feature in this release, and that's the ability to view historical changes of a page or news item. You'll now see a "View change..." link just below the author's name on any page or news item. Tapping that link will bring up the change view shown here.

Swiping left to right will take you to older versions of the content while swiping right to left will return you to newer versions. The view for each version shows what changed from the previous version. Additionally, tapping the View button at the top right will show you the rendered content of the specific version for which you're viewing the changes. It's pretty cool!

As always, we squashed a few bugs too:

Fixed a problem where viewing a blank page or news item would cause the app to crash.
Fixed an issue saving pages or news items with a large amount of text.
Increased the number of comments displayed for long threads.
Fixed an issue where clicking on a link in the calendar macro would cause the app to crash. It no longer crashes, but the calendar macro functions beyond viewing will not work.
Previously, if you typed enough text in a comment it eventually went below the bottom of the text area to where you could no longer see what you were typing. This is now fixed.

Web Client Updates

The following new features were added for the Web Client:

Added the ability to navigate from the comments list to the associated page.
Made the author names shown on pages and news clickable. Now you can simply tap an authors name and be taken to their profile or personal space home page.
Added a version information page to help diagnose issues.

We also improved a few existing features:

General improvements to button alignments and sizes.
Added paging for long lists of items.

And of course there were also a whole bunch of bug fixes:

Fixed problems posting long comments.
Hide the favorite icon when a user isn't logged in.
Fixed problem selecting a user from search results.
Fixed an issue where only a limited number of people were shown on the people list.
Added paging to the spaces list available on the home page. This resolves a timeout issue.
Added better error handling when connecting to a Confluence instance with an invalid Mini Confluence license.
Increased the number of comments displayed for long threads.

As you can see, a lot of work went into this release. We hope you enjoy using the new features as much as we enjoyed building them.

Personal Edition Concedes

2010-09-21T04:00:00Z

Earlier today Mini Confluence Personal Edition conceded the title of best mobile client for Confluence to his bigger brother Enterprise Edition. In a prepared statement, Personal Edition admitted that

it wasn't really much of a competition. Enterprise Edition can do everything I can do up to two times faster and has additional cool features like favorites and user status.

When asked if he saw this change coming, Personal Edition remarked

I did suspect I was in trouble when Enterprise Edition began to sell himself to organizations rather than end users. Who wants to deal with the hassle of having all their users pay their own money to buy me when they can buy one Enterprise Edition plugin and serve everyone?

Despite Personal Edition's fans calling on him to fight on, he declined to delay the inevitable

Effective today, I will no longer be available for purchase from the iTunes App Store. Enterprise Edition has assured me that he will still be there, free for all users!

Prior to his departure, Personal Edition had these parting thoughts for his formidable opponent

Enterprise Edition has proven more capable and better able to serve Confluence users on the go. I give him my full support and wish him well.

MCEE Beta Expires Tomorrow

2010-09-13T04:00:00Z

I want to remind our beta participants that your two week beta extension license for Mini Confluence Enterprise Edition will expire tomorrow and the software will stop working. But have no fear, purchasing a new license is quick and easy. And remember, we only sell commercial licenses at this time, but they'll work on any kind of Confluence installation (commercial, educational, non-profit, etc.). Also, don't forget to use your discount code if you signed up for the beta program before July 9th. The code expires at the end of September.

Mini Confluence Enterprise Edition Now on Sale

2010-09-03T04:00:00Z

After a three-month beta program, Mini Confluence Enterprise Edition (MCEE) is now officially released. I want to thank everyone who participated in the beta, especially those who took the time to send us feedback or report problems. You can find more information about pricing and how to buy here.

Why Subscription Pricing?

2010-08-24T04:00:00Z

You may be wondering why Mini Confluence Enterprise Edition (MCEE) is priced as a yearly subscription with the software ceasing to work if you don't renew your license and upgrade. Confluence, and many of the plugins available for it, generally provide one year of support unless you renew but allow the software to continue working indefinitely. This is what many people have come to expect and I'd like to explain why we're not conforming to convention.

While Mini Confluence Enterprise Edition includes a Confluence plugin, the real value is in the mobile clients. There's a completely native iPhone client, a hybrid native/web Android client, and a full web client for use with other mobile devices.

Every one of our iPhone and Android native client users download the application from the App Store or Android Marketplace and there can only be one version of the application in the store at any given time. That one version has to be able to work with any MCEE plugin currently in use. Allowing MCEE plugins to work indefinitely means that every native client version we release would have to work with all previous versions of the plugin. This places significant restrictions on our ability to evolve the product and continue to provide customers with new and improved features. We're not willing to make that sacrifice.

While you may not agree with our logic for licensing MCEE on a subscription model, I hope you have a better understanding of why we chose to do it this way. We feel it's the only way to ensure we're able to deliver cool new functionality to you in the future.