On 6 October every app macro in your Confluence gets one home. Do you know which one?

[#1]

Type / in a Confluence page on 6 October and the menu will look different. Not broken, different: new categories, a modernised layout, and every Marketplace macro sitting in exactly one place instead of wherever its vendor sprinkled it. If your teams find macros by browsing rather than typing the name, this is a change-management item, and the clock has already started. 🕰️

Atlassian published the deprecation notice in the Confluence Cloud changelog on 25 August (CHANGE-3409), following RFC-140 on the developer community. It is written for app developers. This is the admin translation.

What is changing, in two phases

Phase 1, rollout begins 6 October 2026. The slash menu (/) and the Insert modal get a new set of five categories, and the slash menu will actually show categories for the first time. The new set:

• Structure (native examples: Action item, Table, Status)
• Media (Image, video or file, Link, Emoji)
• Embed (Google Drive, Figma, Dropbox and the like)
• Text formatting (Bullet list, Heading, Quote)
• Data and charts (Database, Jira work items, Child items)

The ten legacy categories that app macros use today (Formatting, Confluence content, Navigation, Admin, Reporting, Development, External content, Media, Visuals and images, Communication) get mapped automatically:

• Formatting, Confluence content, Navigation, Admin → Structure
• Reporting, Development → Data and charts
• Media, Visuals, Communication → Media
• External content → Embed
• No valid category at all → Other elements (plus the default All view)

From that day, in the slash menu, each app macro appears in one category only. The slash menu shows up to 30 items per category with a "View more" link to the modal, and Atlassian commits to always surfacing up to 10 app macros per category on top of that limit, so apps do not vanish behind native elements.

Phase 2, 25 February 2027. The Insert modal follows. App macros appear in one category there too. For Forge apps, the old multi-value categories property stops being recognised entirely and only the new single category value counts (Forge macro manifest reference). Forge macros with no valid value land in Other elements.

The Connect detail that matters to admins

Connect apps do not get the new property at all. A Connect macro will be pinned to the first category its vendor listed, mapped through the table above, and the vendor cannot change that ordering anymore. If a Connect macro declared no categories, it goes to Other elements on 6 October and stays there.

That makes this the second admin-visible symptom of the Connect end-of-support arc, after the migration messaging that started reaching the Connected apps page this summer (I covered what that banner means and does not mean in an earlier article). If you run Connect macros that your teams rely on, where they land in the new menu is now fixed, and the only fix is the vendor's Forge version.

Why admins should care before developers finish their work

Nothing stops working. Every macro still inserts, every existing page still renders. What changes is findability:

1. Training material goes stale. Any internal guide with a screenshot of the Insert menu, or a sentence like "find it under Confluence content," is wrong from 6 October.
2. Macros move house. A reporting macro that showed up under both Reporting and Confluence content will show up under Data and charts only. Users who browsed to it will file "the macro is gone" tickets. It is not gone.
3. Other elements is a junk drawer. Anything that lands there is effectively hidden from browsers and only reachable by typing its name.

The pre-6-October checklist

1. Inventory the app macros your spaces actually use. Confluence Cloud has no CQL box in the search UI, but you can run CQL straight from the browser while logged in, through the content search REST endpoint: https://YOURSITE.atlassian.net/wiki/rest/api/content/search?cql=macro%3D%22macro-key%22&limit=100 returns every page using that macro as JSON. I ran it against my own site this morning with toc as the key; it returns in seconds, no app needed. The macro key is the app's internal name (visible in the page storage format as ac:name, or from the vendor), not the menu label. Run it once per Marketplace app you pay for; the ones with hundreds of hits are the ones whose new location you need to communicate.
2. Ask each vendor one question: "Which category will your macro appear in from 6 October, and is it Forge or Connect?" A Forge vendor can still choose; a Connect vendor can only tell you.
3. Find the Other elements candidates. Any app whose vendor cannot name a category is heading for the junk drawer. Decide now whether to teach users to type the name or push the vendor.
4. Update the two documents everyone copies from: your Confluence style guide and your onboarding page. Replace category-based instructions with "type / and the macro name," which survives every future menu redesign.
5. Note the dates in your change calendar: 6 October (slash menu changes, app macros go single-category there), 25 February 2027 (modal follows, Forge legacy categories switched off).

One honest boundary

The notice says rollout is "expected to begin" on 6 October, which in Atlassian's vocabulary means progressive. Your site may see it that week or some weeks later, and a Preview-track sandbox will likely see it before production. Do not schedule the comms for a single day; schedule them for the window.

Six weeks is more notice than most editor changes get. Use it. 🚀

All links above verified live on 1 September 2026.