Today we released the Gliffy Plugin for Confluence and Gliffy Plugin for JIRA 3.0.3. This update addresses various bug fixes and improvements.

As per user request, we’ve reintegrated the Document Manager back into the Confluence Plugin. This will allow customers to copy certain portions of diagrams into other diagrams.

We also put the Print feature back in. This allows you to Print directly from the editor, not just to PDF.

Below is a complete list of fixes and improvements:

Bug

• [GLIFFY-2213] – ERD connectors are rendered incorrectly in the editor
• [GLIFFY-2218] – Ellipse or Circle in Classic Basic Shapes drop shadow gets cut off
• [GLIFFY-2329] – Grouping not being remembered across saves
• [GLIFFY-2367] – Some Shapes have a shape boundary, while others don't
• [GLIFFY-2374] – Control characters are getting into the Gliffy XML
• [GLIFFY-2375] – Hyperlinks are not aligned with text
• [GLIFFY-2496] – BPMN Group Symbol should be sent to back when dropped
• [GLIFFY-2435] – Drop shadow of Round, Classic shapes are flat at the bottom.
• [GLIFFY-2439] – Line of the Annotation BPMN shape does not show in SVG Export
• [GLIFFY-2449] – Print to PDF 1 page results in multipage Document
• [GLIFFY-2451] – Flash Error When Double-clicking 'new document'
• [GLIFFY-2498] – Text on Line is Not Centered (When Curved Line is Made Straight)
• [GLIFFY-2558] – Adjusting Line Text Font size doesn't always re-center/format text
• [GLIFFY-2564] – Installation Success but ERROR on configuration
• [GLIFFY-2567] – Copy and paste a line with a long line of text, copied line initially looks wrapped.
• [GLIFFY-1900] – Text area looses focus when it shouldn't

Improvement

• [GLIFFY-2534] – Re-integrate the Document Manager back into Confluence
• [GLIFFY-802] – Create a Shortcut for editing text for objects
• [GLIFFY-2469] – Text Tool Defaults in Flowchart Template Result in "White"/Invisislbe Text
• [GLIFFY-2465] – Need Higher Quality Print/Export, specifically line or text based vs. a graphic image

New Feature

• [GLIFFY-565] – Access Tools via Keyboard Shortcuts (Arrow, Hand tool, Line Tool, Connector, Text Tool)

Download the Gliffy Plugin for Confluence 3.0.3

Download the Gliffy Plugin for JIRA 3.0.3

Today we released the 3.0.2 version of the Gliffy Plugins for Confluence and JIRA. This release was to fix an issue where certain installations were not allowing some of our symbol libraries (like Venn symbols) to be loaded.

GLIFFY-2421: Venn Diagram cannot be rendered

Download the Gliffy Plugin for Confluence 3.0.2

Download the Gliffy Plugin for JIRA 3.0.2

The Atlassian Summit 2010 is here! It’s one of our favorite times of the year for many reasons, one being it means we’ve got a big release just for you. Introducing the Gliffy Plugin for Confluence 3.0 for Atlassian Confluence and the Gliffy Plugin for JIRA 3.0 for Atlassian JIRA. Version 3.0 includes exciting new features such as new symbols, templates, line tool improvements, and drawing guides.

New Symbols

Yes, it’s been a while since we’ve added new symbols, but we’ve made some vast upgrades in our architecture that will allow us to put out beautiful new symbols more often. The first batch includes Venn diagram shapes and Sitemap shapes. Venn diagrams are perfect for showing relationships between things:

The new Venn shapes

Want to show your CEO how your companies initiatives will be presented throughout the new website you are building? Use Gliffy’s hot new Site Map shapes to impress. Site-maps are an integral part of web-site design that shows how a site is accessed and organized:

The new Site Map shapes

Finally, we’ve also added new fresh skins for our Basic and Flowchart shapes that will add sparkle to your diagrams. You can still use our classic skins too, located via the dropdown under each respective tab on the left hand side of Gliffy.

The new Fresh skin for Flowchart shapes

Templates
By popular demand, we’re proud to introduce templates to the plugins. When you add a diagram to a Confluence page or JIRA issue, you are immediately given the option to create a type of diagram based from a template provided by us (i.e. flowchart, floor plan, UML, etc.), or a template from your existing design (Confluence only). You can also use a template that can be stored on your computer using our new Import/Export Gliffy XML feature. This is very useful if you want to take a diagram you did in Gliffy Online and use it in Confluence or JIRA. Note to Confluence users: we have removed the Document Manager since it’s purpose previously was for copying an existing diagram to create a new diagram. The Template Manager now does this in a more elegant fashion.

The Template Manager showing a UML template

Line Tool Improvements
We’ve also made some big improvements to our connector line tool. You can now add curved lines, quadratic bezier curves to be exact. Plus, we’ve added a new arrow type that can be accessed via the line ends property drop-down. You can also create lines that have a fill color and a border color. To do this, select a line, make the width of the line 3px or more (third selection on line width drop down or lower), and select a fill color. Viola! To change the border color, select a line color for that line.

Curved lines

Drawing Guides
Finally, we’ve added drawing guides. To turn the drawing guides on, click anywhere on the visible page and you will see a “drawing guides” checkbox under the document properties. Check it to turn the guides on. When you drag a shape on the visible page, guides will show for different alignments. A red line will show when a shape is aligned to the center of another shape, and a green line will show when an edge is aligned to the edge of another shape. The drawing guides have replaced snap-to-grid.

Aligning shapes by center

Aligning shapes by left edge

Chris put together this nice video to show you some of our new features in action:

New features in action in Confluence
To see a complete list of bug fixes and other improvements, click below:

• Gliffy Plugin for Confluence – 3.0
• Gliffy Plugin for JIRA – 3.0

The updated plugins are available immediately on their respective download pages:

• Confluence Plugin
• JIRA Plugin

The Gliffy Plugin for Confluence 3.0 works on Confluence 2.9 and above and the Gliffy Plugin for JIRA works on JIRA 3.13 and above.

If you have any suggestions or issues with Gliffy, please don’t hesitate to contact us!

The entire Gliffy staff is proud to provide our Gliffy Users with (drum roll please) the Gliffy User Manual

Now, as you work on your complicated Network Diagrams or fancy Flow Charts, you can easily search for basic how-to’s, hints, tips and features in the Gliffy User Manual. We still cant help with shoveling snow, but we are happy to provide you with a way to navigate our application.

The current manual covers Gliffy Online, Gliffy Confluence Plugin, Gliffy JIRA Plugin. Wondering how to add links to your diagram or publish your diagram — It’s all in the manual.

Thanks to all for their hard work on pulling this long-awaited feature from a JIRA issue to reality.

Keep those suggestions for features coming — we love to create the program you love!

–Your Gliffy Team

Gliffy is stretching its legs and making moves!

Sim from Akeles Consulting in Singapore just took the time to post a shout-out about value of the Gliffy Confluence Plugin. Thanks Sim! And if that post perks your interest, we’ve made it extra easy to see exactly what Sim is talking about.

So you can see us in action, Gliffy has sandboxes online that let you test drive both the Gliffy Confluence Plugin and the Gliffy JIRA Plugin. No downloads, no sign ups, just instant access.

The Gliffy Confluence Plugin sandbox is accessible here.

The Gliffy JIRA Plugin sandbox is accessible here.

Hot on the heals of the 1.5 release of our Confluence Plugin, and right around the time we expect to release our JIRA Plugin, I’ll be presenting both products at the Plugin of the Month Webinar hosted by Atlassian on January 28th.

If you’re interested in learning more about how Gliffy Plugins work with Atlassian products, this is a must attend event, and you should definitely register for the webinar today.

If you like this webinar, you’ll probably be interested in Atlassian’s other fine events coming up, too.

See you at the webinar!

It’s been a challenge getting the most recent release of The Gliffy Plugin for Confluence shipped.

What follows is a long nerdy story describing one of the challenges we have faced getting Confluence 1.4.0 shipped. If you don’t want to read the whole story, do please take note that it ends with this important notice: The Gliffy Plugin for Confluence 1.4.0 will require Confluence 2.6 or better.

One of the biggest problems we’ve encountered is related to the fact that we’ve tried really really hard to support as many older versions of Confluence as possible. This dedication does, on occasion, create big headaches for us. Sometimes, I’ve learned, we just can’t have our cake and eat it too.

So what’s going on?

Our story begins way back in November of 2006 when we first released the Gliffy Plugin for Confluence (GPFC for short). Be forewarned, this is going to get geeky real fast.

A brief overview about how GPFC is architected
When you save a diagram in Confluence, it is written out in an XML format. That’s just great, but XML isn’t exactly a human readable format. We overcome this by transcoding our Gliffy XML format to SVG, and then use the software package Batik to transcode the SVG to an image.

So what’s the problem?
Well, it turns out that Confluence versions 2.2 through 2.5 all ship with Batik 1.5 pre installed. Unfortunately, Gliffy requires Batik 1.6 in order to render diagrams correctly. Probably the most elegant solution at this point is to let the Confluence Plugin Class Loader solve this by letting us bundle any number of jars with the plugin distribution. The idea is that the Plugin Class Loader should be smart enough to load classes bundled with the Plugin first (ie, Batik 1.6 which we require) before trying to load classes from anywhere else (ie Batik 1.5 that ships with Confluence 2.2). Unfortunately, back in the early days of Confluence 2.2, the plugin class loader wasn’t very smart, and I’m pretty sure it couldn’t even load jars bundled with plugins at that time.

Back in November 2006 when we first released the GPFC, it was critical that we supported as many older versions of Confluence as possible since we knew there would be a ton of customers using those older versions. In fact, back then we were compatible with some Confluence versions in the 1.X series. Anyway, how did we solve the problem?

The Hack
The solution ended up being pretty filthy. Basically, we changed the namespace of the version of Batik we needed from org.apache.batik to gliffyorg.apache.batik, then compiled from source. This allowed us to ship Batik 1.6 with our plugin without running into naming conflicts with the 1.5 version of Batik that is shipped with Confluence.

In retrospect, this probably wasn’t the best solution, but it did solve our problem at the time. If I ran into a similar problem again, I’d probably look more seriously into writing our own class loader as a means for guaranteeing we’d get the versions of a class or library we needed…. but with Confluence this might not be a trivial task since Clustered versions of Confluence store plugins in the database. Arrrr!

So what’s the problem now?
One of the big new features in the GPFC 1.4 is our new symbol libraries. The new symbol libraries are WAY better looking than the old ones, and they generally behave a lot better too. The Gliffy Plugin for Confluence 1.4 will have an awesome set of Network Diagram Symbols, Floor Plan symbols, Wireframe Symbols, and more. When were finally merged the new symbol library codebase with the GPFC, we noticed there were some issues with our re-namespaced version of Batik…. basically, the new symbol libraries didn’t work with our munged version of Batik. Somehow, we introduced a bug when we re-namespaced Batik.

Now, it’s important to realize that Batik is no small bit of code. Digging into why things weren’t rendering correctly was going to be no small task…. and we knew that this hacky-go-lucky thing we had going on with the whole re-namspacing business was… well… unclean in the first place.

We needed a new solution
This got us starting to look at the whole problem again with fresh eyes. We tried a whole bunch of solutions that ended up being dead ends. I tried re-namspacing Batik 1.7 , hoping that the before mentioned rendering issue would just go away. This ended up having it’s own set of issues, plus this was just the same unclean strategy as we had tried before.

I then spent some time looking into seeing which versions of Confluence would let us bundle Batik 1.6 un-modified. Unfortunately, with all versions of Confluence, I was unable to bundle Batik due to yet another class loader problem in Batik or Confluence….

Is this worth it?
It was about this time Friday that I started to get pretty annoyed. Here I am, trying to get the GPFC setup so that customers can take advantage of all these great new symbol libraries, but at the same time watching the clock tick by as I’m stuck trying to solve these annoying problems that seemingly have no solutions. Think about it: Our customers aren’t getting access to a new version of our software simply because we’re trying so hard to support old versions of Confluence.

So we started to re-think assumptions, as we often do. My chief concern all this time has been that we didn’t want to upset current customers by requiring them to upgrade to a recent version of Confluence to get new features.

Well, we tried really hard to support older versions of Confluence with this release, but it’s just not going to happen. Sorry.

The Solution
At the end of it all, we’ve decided that The Gliffy Plugin for Confluence 1.4.0 will require Confluence 2.6 or better. Why? Since Confluence 2.6 ships with Batik 1.6, the whole issue just goes away.

Now, back to the original concern, which is that we want to make sure our customers don’t feel like they are forced to upgrade Confluence to get the most recent version of Gliffy. Well, our thinking in this area is that if a customer hasn’t upgraded to Confluence 2.6 or better in the 9 months since it has been available, upgrading to the GPFC 1.4.0 probably isn’t at the top of their list either. Some other plugins, such as the Calendar Plugin, require versions of Confluence as recent as 2.8 to get the latest and greatest plugin features.

OK, if you got this far, thanks for reading. Do please let us know in the comments to this post, or by contacting support directly, if requiring Confluence 2.6 for the next feature release of the Gliffy Plugin for Confluence is asking too much…. we want to hear from you!

Great news: The Gliffy Plugin for Confluence is now available to Confluence Hosted customers, at no additional charge.

Through a development partnership, the benefits of the Gliffy Plugin will be available when using the hosted version of this award wining enterprise wiki. Why Confluence Hosted? It enables you to quickly edit your wiki from anywhere without dedicated IT resources. The Confluence Wiki gives you the following added benefits:

• Enterprise Security – with SSL
• Attractive, user-friendly WYSIWYG interface
• Monthly credit-card billing
• And dozens of other great features!

And now, with the Gliffy Plugin, you can add great looking drawings to that list! Gliffy enables you to create Flowcharts, UI wireframes, Floor plans, Network diagrams, UML diagrams, and many more diagrams or simple drawings with just one click.

The Gliffy Plugin for Confluence is a secure and easy way to utilize the power of the Gliffy diagram editor to create professional looking diagrams within Confluence. Diagrams created with the Gliffy Plugin for Confluence are stored as attachments, allowing Confluence to manage the revision history.

Learn more about Confluence Hosted:

This is your chance to meet the people behind Gliffy. We will be on hand April 23-25 at the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. Take a moment to introduce yourself to us; we will be sharing booth space 535 with Atlassian Software Systems.

We think this is a great opportunity to:

• explore the latest that Gliffy has to offer
• share with us what you’d like to see next with the program
• meet our talented team
• ask questions

If your team is considering Gliffy, stop by and test the program with us. We are confident you will be impressed.
As a thanks for saying hello, discount codes for purchase of new Gliffy Plugin for Confluence Licenses will be handed out at the booth (suggestion: other cool schwag available, get there early).

Chris Kohlhardt, the CEO & Founder, and Clint Dickson, VP of Engineering & Founder, will be available during the conference. This is a great time to get information about Gliffy from the founders. If you would like to make an appointment with us in advance, drop us a note. Mark your conference schedule for 2pm Wednesday the 23rd and 4pm Thursday the 24th for a mini-presentation in the booth by Chris.

We would be glad to see you at Web 2.0 Expo!

We are happy to announce the release of The Gliffy Plugin for Confluence 1.3.5. This is a significant bug fix release, and we encourage all customers to upgrade to this release. Download this release or upgrade using the repository client. As always, restart Confluence after you upgrade to complete the installation.

• Fixed issue where diagrams with certain characters failed to show up correctly in Document Manager
• When diagrams are stored as attachments to a page, we now set the size of the attachment
• Creating a diagram with name ‘ççççç’ fails
• Fix two image generation issues
• Fixed issue where long diagram names get cut off in the Gliffy editor
• Fixed issue where theme is lost for Builder plugin when visiting the ‘New Diagram’ page
• Fixed issue where File->Open Document manager failed sometimes when Anonymous users edit diagrams
• Fixed issue where blank text shape showed up in diagrams
• Default diagram settings not set correctly
• Make plugin compatible with Confluence 2.7
• Near infinite loop causes out of memory errors
• Support Personal Spaces within Document Manager
• Enable licensing option for folks who are using free Confluence personal license
• Add ‘Remove Diagram’ link next to ‘Edit Diagram’ and ‘Full Size’ diagram lnks
• Extractor shouldn’t warn that every attachment is not in the database