Migrating from Data Center to Cloud — 150+ pages stuck in legacy content macro. Any help?

[Aliza Chudnow]

Hi everyone,

My company is in the process of migrating from Confluence Data Center to Cloud and I'm looking for advice from anyone who has dealt with a similar situation.

Our setup:
We are in the middle of creating a People Portal wiki with 150+ pages (and still growing) that serves as a self-service HR resource for all employees at our company. Over the past year, we carefully built every page using Panel, Section, and Column macros to create a clean, organized layout.

The problem:
After migration, all of this content gets wrapped in the legacy content macro. The pages:

• Don't look the same as they did in Data Center — formatting is broken/off
• Cannot be duplicated to create new pages
• Cannot be used as templates going forward

My main question:
Am I missing something about legacy content? Can it actually be edited in a meaningful way? From what I can tell, the editing capabilities are extremely limited — I can change text, but I can't restructure the layout, add/move macros, or really do anything beyond minor text updates. If there's a way to properly work with legacy content that I'm not seeing, I'd love to know.

If not, that means we're looking at completely redesigning 150+ pages from scratch with no way to continue building new pages in the same format.

Also looking for:

1. Has anyone found a good workflow for rebuilding a large number of pages like this in Cloud?
2. Are there any marketplace apps (Aura, etc.) that have helped replicate Panel/Section/Column layouts in Cloud?
3. Any tips for making this process more efficient at scale?
4. Is there any way to bulk-convert or batch-update legacy content pages?

Any advice or shared experiences would be really appreciated. Thank you!

[Tomislav Tobijas]

Hey @Aliza Chudnow ,

Yeah... Cloud editor doesn't support nested macros or deprecated Section and Column macros. In the cloud, you could use layouts, but it's fairly limited compared to some features in DC.

If you'd like anything more advanced, Aura, Refined, and similar apps could be the solution. Maybe... 🫤

You could list all legacy content (per space) by navigating to Space settings > General > Legacy content 

Bulk conversion was available before in Confluence administration > General configuration (there was a checkbox), but I'm not sure if they've removed it.

What could definitely work for this is if you'd reach out to Atlassian Support and ask them to do bulk update for you. We did something similar after last Confluence migration and, after going back and forth, the support team did bulk updates on specific pages. 👀

Cheers,
Tobi