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Update to default sort order for newly created pages

Elaine H.

Hi Community! My name is Elaine and I’m a Confluence Product Manager. I want to discuss with you a recent change we made to the default placement of newly created pages in the page tree.

In the past, newly created pages were added to the page tree by alphabetical order (natural sort order to be exact). We made a change to place the new page at the bottom under the parent page instead. In other words, new pages are now added to the page tree by date created.

This change was driven by a shift in how teams use Confluence. In early days, Confluence was primarily used for documentation with relatively static structure and content. With more teams adopting Confluence for project collaboration, their content is more dynamic and users more diverse. Alphabetic order has its limitations, especially in a constantly changing environment.

Based on our user learnings, we believe this new default sort order together with drag & drop page reordering in the page tree (coming soon) suit the needs of the majority of teams using Confluence today.

For those of you who may find alphabetical order more relevant, it's still available under Space Settings -> Content Tools -> Reorder Pages as explained on Move, Copy, and Hide Pages.

Every team’s need is unique when it comes to organizing information. We would like to hear your feedback on this change, understand how you organize your Confluence space, and discuss ideas on where we can help. Thank you!

Comments

Koosh Shah

You should allow each user to be able to select which option they want. We use ours mainly for documentation so sorting alphabetically is important. Now I have to keep going in to Reorder Pages to sort manually which is a PITA.

Christian Bell

The same is valid for the alternative suggestion "For those of you who may find alphabetical order more relevant, it's still available under Space Settings -> Content Tools -> Reorder Pages"

Every time you create a page, you manually need to go there and reorder. Nice "improvement".

Elaine H.

@Koosh Shah and @Christian Bell, I hear your concern. We are aware that alphabetical order may be more effective for some use cases. Yours seem to be the case. The Space Settings suggestion is the best possible workaround at the moment. We have room to improve. We plan to continue iterating on this and explore other ways to help you organize your Confluence content.

Do you mind sharing a bit more about your particular use case? This will really help us come up with better solutions to solve the organization problems you face using Confluence. For example,

What kind of content do you put in Confluence?
Who create pages? Who organize pages? Who look for and view pages via the page tree?
How do page authors name the title of a page to make alphabetical order useful for viewers looking for it?
Have you tried other sorting approaches to compare? Where do you see alphabetical sorting excel from the perspectives of content creator, organizer, and viewer respectively?
Are you aware of the sidebar page tree drag & drop reordering feature we're rolling out? How do you think of it and manual page ordering in general?

If you prefer to discuss this privately, please let me know. I can make arrangement. Thank you for your time.

Christian Bell

@Elaine H.I can give you more information in a private discussion. Just contact me.

Sebastian Wille

Hi Elaine,

for us it is also a big pain. We are using Confluence since three years (and before several years in another company) and we rely on alphabetic order. The change came suddenly last autumn and caused already some problems internally costing us time and money.

We use pages names like "2018-12-14 - Meeting x and y" etc. or start page names with a customer ID etc. All this is based on alphabetic order.

Now, our system which works out for year and everybody uses is not working anymore. Changing such a behaviour without having a chance for a button for the "old" behaviour is a big, big pain!

I would be great to include a option how Confluence deals with new pages (alphabetic or chronological).

Best,

Sebastian

Sebastian Wille

What do you think, @Elaine H.?

Sebastian Wille

:-/, @Elaine H.

Elaine H.

Hi Sebastian,

Thank you for sharing the details on how your team organizes pages to take advantage of the alphabetical order. I can imagine the extra effort you have to make to keep your Confluence running and acknowledge the current workaround is not desirable in your situation.

In our plan, we're not throwing away alphabetical order. The current state is an early stage of an iterative reengineering effort of our product. In fact, we want to bring back alphabetical order and are also considering adding more flexibility around how pages are organized and viewed.

Point taken on opportunity for us to manage product changes better. We're working on communicating product changes more proactively and in advance.

There are two aspects of this I'd like to hear your thoughts on:

For alphabetical order to work, I imagine it would require a thoughtfully planned and rigorously followed page naming convention and other organization rules. Often times, this requires a lot of effort and discipline. We've heard from some customers that they had a hard time keeping up and ended up with a mess where things were hard to find. How did you make it work in your organization? Any word of advice to share with the community?
We've also learnt that people have different preferences when it comes to how to classify and find information. Do you believe there can be one single organization system (in this case alphabetically sorted page tree) that could fit all your users' needs?

Please feel free to comment here, or if you prefer a 1:1 chat on these, you can reach us at the following email:

ask-confluence-cloud at atlassian dot com

Thank you,

Elaine

Michael Sica (Partners Test Account)

This change is terrible, and the way to deal with it is ludicrous.

I can understand some users wanting a configuration option to sort by date, but the way you've solved those user's problem wrecks it for everyone else.

Just let it be a global setting for the space, and allow people to manually override it per set of child pages.

Between this change, the removal of nested tables, and the new UI design, Confluence just keeps getting worse.

Dave Todaro_pqmkoa

I feel like this is a bug; the old functionality was very elegant:

By default, newly-created pages sorted alphabetically within the parent page.
If the order of child pages within the parent page was manually changed, the alphabetical sort order for that page was turned off. Newly-added pages would be added to the end of the list, preserving the manual order within that parent page.
If you went to Reorder Pages and clicked the AZ alphabetical sort button on a page, the sort order for its child pages would be reset to alphabetical, and newly-added child pages within that branch of the hierarchy again would be automatically sorted in alphabetical order.

This behavior gives users the best of both worlds--alpha sort by default or manual sort by default. It handled what everyone wants, whether their flavor is alphabetical or "add to the end."

I encourage you to reopen https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-64922.

Dave Todaro

Author, The Epic Guide to Agile

Elaine H.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us, Dave. I understand that from your perspective, if it doesn't work in a way that addresses your need, it's broken as a bug. We closed CONFCLOUD-64922 following internal workflow. Rest assured, this issue is now on our product backlog.

As discussed in my earlier response to Sebastian,

The current behavior is not how we've planned for the future. We've been going through major reengineering while building new features such as page tree drag & drop that have been well received by Confluence customers. This is one of those hard tradeoffs we had to make in the short term.
Besides bringing back the previous experience, we're exploring various options to solve for the sorting problem. One approach is to give individual users the ability to sort in any way (including by alphabetical order) they need without affecting the shared hierarchy. This is based on our customer learning that how people browse/search is a highly personal and situational choice. Meanwhile, this may reduce the pressure/effort to rigorously maintain a one-size-fits-all tree structure.

I'd love to hear your thoughts about this and anything on your mind around this topic.

If you'd like a 1:1 chat, you can email:

ask-confluence-cloud at atlassian dot com

Ask for Elaine in your email and I'll follow up.

Lenka Red

Hello.

It is a very inconvenient to use such strange approach: we waste a lot of time to find needed page in the list

Is any hope that it could be fixed some time?

David Hopkins

Just to add to the mix.. I would love it both ways.. lol

On the side bar I need the pages sorted Alpha. We use the sidebar page list like an index in a document. As i expect most people do.

On the root page of each section I have a "Child Pages" macro that lists all sub pages by Last Edit date .. simply displaying that list as an MRU (Most Recently Used) ..

This gives us the best of both worlds.

e.g. we have a full space built as doc for an application. Build doc as well as Dev doc are in this one project space. The sidebar list IS our index.. and if you click on 06 Testing, sub section 03 Test Scripts you'll see the MRU where the most recently edited files are on top.

The biggest PITA here is that we have to manually re sort the file list EVERYTIME I change a page name or add a new page.

Kathryn Moye

Our team is finding that even after sorting alphabetically in Reorder Pages, that sort is not stored. If you refresh the screen, it goes back to modified date sort. We are in an old Confluence version, though, so that may be the problem. 6.4.3. Also, the sidebars cannot be sorted alphabetically since sorting on the reorder pages page doesn't store the sort preference.

jondomanus

@Elaine H.

This approach seems silly. As mentioned by others, having to manually re-order is a PITA. I even think that sending new pages to the bottom of the parent is silly. Why not put them at the top where they would be seen right away?

Sending them to the bottom of a tree of dozens of other pages makes it harder for users to find what they're looking for.

I've also been in product management for quite some time now and human behavior is inherently to find things in alphabetical order. If I give you a dictionary and ask you to find the definition of "Bananas", you're going to jump to the section starting with the first character of the word. You're not going to go searching for when the term "Bananas" was added to the dictionary and then find the date.

Christian Abbühl

In the last company (2018) already we had an issue with not beeing able to set alphabetical order and it was quite a pain in the ass. Now beeing admin of confluence in my new company I know why they told us that.

You expect Admins to set manually alphabetical order to a Page in the Space Konfig (Around 10 Clicks of effort and a waste of time) each time after someone creates a SubPage, because we cant set it as default when there are no Subfolders yet or a possibility to give an inheritance of this setting? It's a bit of a joke. You know that there often will follow hundreds or even thousands of pages right? Specially when you get started with Confluence.

For departments or companies that rely on alphabetical ordering, don't purchase confluence yet.

Pls give us ASAP in 2021 an opportunity to set alphabetical ordering in the left Navigation as default in global or space setting.

Thank you and merry christmas!

Mike Mills_wxjfwb

This is a large problem for us. We are using this for a formal documentation of our processes and are replacing a basic wiki which sorted our pages in the left sidebar by default. The ability to do this manually should also mean it is very simple to have this done automatically. Perhaps even an API that we could use to call this hourly? There has to be a solution to this simple problem that is causing headaches for many of your customers.

Chris Bishell

I won't repeat what others have clearly stated in the above. It's crazy that this is even an issue that hasn't been resolved.

PLEASE can we have a fix

Nathan Farrar_ml2prb

Please allow configuration of pages to be sorted alphabetically by default. It's insanely obnoxious to have to resort every single time a new page is created.

nelcy.gautier

Likewise, alphabetical order by default is a basic

nelcy.gautier

Make sure to also upvote here

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-65454?error=consent_required&error_description=Consent+required&state=0e209868-929d-443b-96d0-dd69d71e0b84

Nathan Phipps

The ability to change default page ordering behavior should be a space setting. I actually like the new behavior for most spaces, but I have a glossary space where new pages should be automatically ordered alphabetically.

Having to use "reorder pages" after every new page creation is a poor workaround.

Vote for this "suggestion" which is the closest match I could find for this issue: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-65454?jql=project%20%3D%20CONFCLOUD%20AND%20text%20~%20%22order%20page%20alphabetical%22

PJ Balsley_5sjhn0

I can't believe an issue like this has yet to go unfixed for years!!!

Then we have to vote to get attention to the matter. Seems like it is an obvious problem. Who has time to constantly re-order pages manually?

Steven Slezak

Hey Atlassian,

Another admin chiming in to say that the alphabetical sorting was the better option. In our case we use templates to create onboarding and offboarding pages. The naming scheme for these pages relates to the Jira ticket that created them. "IT-XXXX | User Name". By entering in this information, the pages would sort neatly in order to audit and reference with ease. I don't want to have to do this manually. Why would a drag and drop feature dictate that the default sorting must be by date? Why not make it alphabetical and still have the drag and drop feature? This really isn't a big ask from the Atlassian community.

Jen Grau

I think this worked well in the past when things defaulted to Alpha they'd always be alpha unless you moved a page, then it switched to appending. Introducing the append as the default isn't necessarily the problem, but the fact when you go to Re-order to alpha it doesn't preserve that choice when new pages are created. In my opinion this was a bug introduced because changing the default order should not have resulted in the loss of preserving the choice on Reorder. This item seems to be represented by these two CONFCLOUD-65454 and CONFCLOUD-65062.

Richard Tovell

Just adding here that the lack of progress on this front is particularly frustrating. There should be a setting allowing you to determine which order you wish to employ by Space. This would resolve the issue, I feel.

Jonathan Smith

1 year later. We are new cloud users and just found this situation. Was there any progress made on allowing A-Z where new pages keep that order?

Stefan Knechtel

Stephanie Comtois

Does this apply also to existing pages when updating? I've noticed that the topic gets moved to the bottom / reorders the tree when I am making updates. So is this applying that default sort whenever a change is made?

Jonathan Smith

I just modified an existing page and it didn't reorder.
My new published pages get put at the bottom of the parent tree.

Stephanie Comtois

We recently migrated content from the legacy editor and I am converting those pages now. Every time I do, it reorders that topic.

Michal ZOBEC

you broken this feature in 2018 and after six years (!) you still not fix it!

alphabetical ordering is logically basic feature. and you turn off it. I not understand how thinking your people from UX design.

this unrequested changes is frustrating from Atlassian. I know many other problems and also in this case solution is for many years, typically 6+ years.

FYI @Elaine H.

Mitch Gersbach

With the new Databases feature, the workaround of manually digging into settings to click A>Z sorting is broken; databases do not sort with pages.

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