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Wiki Markup in Confluence 4 (again)

dvayanu

Hello,

I was reading http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/CONFKB/Wiki+markup+tab+no+longer+exists+in+Confluence+4.0 and since it stops pretty much in nowhere and the old forums are readonly I expected to find another discussion here, but I didn't find anything or was too stupid to find it.

However, is there anything where the discussion takes place, or any discussion at all, voting to get the wiki style editor back or something? I'm short before freaking out (still I'm not) cause our just prolonged jira/confluence license worth 8K is well, useless overnight, and this ... sucks :-(

Personally I can't even edit a single page anymore (yes i can write wiki markup, but i can't edit in wiki markup) and I can't even bloody center an attachment.

So is there anything to read on here?

Accepted answers

Rob Moser

I think a lot of this discussion misses the point:

Yes, we can train ourselves and our users to use the new system. I don't want to train anyone to use a new system. The old one worked great, thanks. The entire point of a wiki for us was quick-and-easy collaborative doco that _didn't_ require training.

Yes, you can use keyboard shortcuts and auto-completion and mouse buttons to accomplish the same input, but you can't edit it. You can't see exactly where the markup begins and decide to put your cursor on one side or the other. Markup is useful over WYSIWYG - among other reasons - precisely because you can see things that are invisible formatting. Also, WYSIWYG editors - this one included - insert a lot of formatting automatically, because it guesses what I want next (e.g. another bullet point.) I don't want to have to keep looking up at the screen to see what the auto-formatting has done with my text; I _know_ what formatting I told it to use, and there shouldn't be anything else there. And anything that makes me take my hands off the keyboard or do multi-key shortcuts is just slowing me down.

I applaud the idea of improving the editor for those that use it, but I fail to see why it helps anyone to take markup away from those who prefer that instead. We upgraded to 4.0 because our main Confluence admin wasn't aware of what it entailed, but I don't think we'll be staying with it if we can't find some way of going back to text-only only-do-what-I-said editing.

All comments

David at David Simpson Apps

You won't win a battle with Atlassian to get wiki markup retrofitted into Confluence 4. They've been dogfooding the new editor for months internally and everyone there is sold on it. Your options are likely to be either to adapt, stand still or migrate elsewhere.

Andre van der Elst

I too miss the forums, this site seems to be for questions & answers only, not for discussions.

Anyway, I have yet to try the upgrade to 4.0, but will probably have to test a very long time (and have this same discussion with a lot of my users!) before I can upgrade to 4.0 (if at all).

Ellen Feaheny [

Perhaps try and understand Confluence 4.0 before judging. They did test this internally (dogfooding) for months - and with customers.

Here's a plethora of resources:

And they have a live webinar next week, Sept 27, 2011 - so get in on it.

(Don't know for sure, but indeed they might record it - or capture the many questions you have in earnest. Of course you are not alone - and they know this - so working the input is important to them).

dvayanu

Hello Ellen et al,

yes I tried. Tried about 30 minutes to get a stupid image centered !...|align=center! simply doesn't work anymore, and there is no edit mode. That's what bothers me most, I can enter markup, but I can't edit it. Do I know have to keep all my text in an external editor until its final and I can let confluence transform it into something irreversible?

I checked out this page:

http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Confluence+4.0+Editor+-+What%27s+Changed+for+Wiki+Markup+Users

And I find that the new features in the editor are great, except for one thing, there is no wiki markup anymore. And a wiki without wiki-markup is not really a wiki. Do you know any serious html producer who works with wysiwig dreamweaver only and never edits the code? Do you know any serious developer who works exclusively with code generator and never writes code by himself? Same applies here, the most accurate document is still produced manually and this has been taken away :-(

As for testing with customers, well maybe they did. They most certainly read Inspired by Marty Cagan and other great product development books. Still they didn't warn: "Before update, please note, that we removed the key features from the product". I have the confuence 4 mail right here, and I don't find a word of a warning.

Unless you understand

Faster. Richer. Simpler.

as warning.

Matt

Leon, if you click an image in the new editor you can center it using the alignment options in the toolbar.

Ellen Feaheny [

I hear your frustration - and two things come to mind.

a) Remember you are on the cutting edge. YOU are using it on Day 2 of its release. So - that is mighty admirable! EVEN if you are only testing at this time.

b) I would love to hear your thoughts in two weeks - and see if they are the same as today. Would be an interesting check point.

Really not trying to call you out - but you are funny. Cutting edge is always an interesting learning curve - and you are not even giving yourself this credit.

Please report back.

You might not even remember the old way by then..

BillA

Tried about 30 minutes to get a stupid image centered !...|align=center! simply doesn't work anymore

Aligning images works the same way as aligning text...select the image and use the align buttons in the editor toolbar to align it. Sorry for not explaining that better in the what's changed for wiki markup users document. We've now updated that page to explain more clearly and updated the general documentation.

Please let us know what other specific challenges you encounter as you progress.

dvayanu

Thanx Bill, I figured that out too. Once you accept the paradigm shift, things works as expected.

I never used the RT Editor before, that made migraton harder.

JamieA

There's a lot to like in the new editor, particularly if you're not an advanced user. However there is plenty room for improvement if you are. Eg start typing a macro name, the macro browser comes up and you select it. Then you have to actually get your mouse, click it, click edit, rather than be able to type in the parameters. Everytime I reach for the mouse a little bit of me dies. Being able to do everything from the keyboard should be possible in the new editor.

Gavin Fowler

I've been testing Confluence 4.0 on a development instance. We all will transition to the new editor, BUT i do agree strongly with what Jamie Echlin has stated - "Every-time I reach for the mouse a little bit of me dies". The entry of complex macro syntax has to (a) be improved (b) made quicker. I document a huge amount of Linux configuration how-to's and/ development code snippets. Transitioning something like: {code:language=bash} in the new editor now requires three button clicks, where as before i could just on typing.

I guess keyboard shortcuts wld be better, or mechanisms to insert macro parameters in a more intuitive manner. Even something like "code complete" wld be better than mouse. I'm sure you guys will improve it...just my 2 cents worth for now.

Henrik Henrik2

Hi,

I'm speaking as a regular user here.

The advantage of wiki markup is that I do not focus on layout, a very advantageous benefit of using Wiki markup. As a Customer I focus on value and content, and not layout; this is exactly what a wiki markup helps me focus on From my perspective it seems that you have forgotten all about value in using a wiki, and instead focused on presentation.

At our company we choosed a wiki (where we could use markup) in order to focus on content, with an Atlassian focus on layout, and ultimately an explicit decision not to focus on content, we would in all likelely-hood never have chosen Confluence.

We use JIRA heavily. For user stories we have a need to paste in wiki markup, due to poor integration between Confluence/JIRA; if we are unable to extract wiki markup the analysis that some of us are making will be unformated in the user stories that our scrum teams are to take in. This is a far from ideal situation, as it effectively results in a loss of information.

Furthermore, when I am analysing a user story I would much rather focus on value than visualization, with a new layout I may spend too much time on this, something that should be kept in mind when evaluating the value of a feature.

If I were a prospect I would say that all of this would be sufficient reason to use another wiki.

BillA

Hello folks,

I've noticed a recurring theme in this thread that people want to be able to set macro paramters without using a mouse. One of the macro autocomplete refinements we made over the many months of dogfooding within Atlassian was to only open the macro browser if you're inserting a macro with madatory properties. Otherwise, it just inserts the macro with the default parameters set - For many macros, you just want to use the defaults.

But what we're hearing you say is that you do sometimes want to set optional macro parameters (e.g. code:language=bash) when using autocomplete. So one idea we have is to open the macro browser if you type a colon (':') while inserting a macro with autocomplete. This would signal that you want to set some paramaters.

So in the {code:language=bash} example above you'd type "{code:" and then the macro browser would open with the first field of the code macro selected. You could then tab through to change your parmaters and hit ENTER at any point to insert the macro in the page all without using the mouse.

Do foiks think this would solve some of the problems you're having?

Gavin Fowler

Hi Bill, I've been playing around in the new editor some more and I think you may be on to something.

As you've correctly identified, the difficulty is setting macro fields outside the default. So the current behaviour, using our example, is type "{code" in the editor, and from there we have two options

Select the macro (which uses default values)
Search Macro

Obviously we'll select the macro we intended, but then it requires editing the macro and changing default values (time consuming and new muscle memory my fingers and mouse hand will struggle to acquire)

I think the suggestion of suffixing the macro name with a semicolon, to immediately bring up that specific macro fields editor would certainly save some extra key stokes / mouse clicks, is definitely more intuitive characteristic and would certainly assist the user for the macros whose syntax we're not 100% familiar with (and therefore can't use within "Insert Wiki Markup Dialog").

I also see there is an added bonus, hardened wiki notation users like myself (old dog, new tricks?) will undoubtedly type wiki syntax. I've noticed if you don't select any pop options and blindly keep typing, the current editor assumes you're entering in normal text - so I've been typing the text {code:language=bash} a lot (not interpreted as a macro). Having the macro fields dialog open on semicolon will also mitigate that newbee (old dog?) mistakes.

Just my thoughts, but I support your idea!

EDIT: Typo's

JamieA

+1 from me.

Kevin Buchs2

Sounds reasonable

Kai Stian Olsta

There is another problem/challenge with the new editor.

If you have a separate Confluence installation on your laptop that you use for documenting meeting, seminars and so on. And then you would like to transfer pages and/or part of a page to another Confluence installation on a separate and isolated network were transfer of data can only be done with a USB disk you got a problem.

In earlier versions you could just copy the markup, save it to a file on the USB drive. Transfer it to the other network and just paste the markup code in a page. The removal of this feature is a huge deal breaker.

JamieA

Can't you do View Wiki Markup then paste that in? Even if you have to paste it into the wiki markup macro thing?

If you can't I agree this is a problem. If I have a long complex page to write I will often do it in a local confluence instance, then transfer to production instance when done. I do this with Edit in Word, particularly if I have lots of screenshots, because it's the easy way to get screenshots in.

Kai Stian Olsta

Confluence 4 dosen't have View Wiki Markup.

Matt

The 'View Source' option in the Tools menu allows you to copy content from one Confluence instance to another. See:

http://screencast.com/t/oJF7T707p

Douglas Pierce

Without the markup language, it was way too slow to enter the standup notes during our daily standup. Can you please give us the option of using the markup language? Now it seems that it is easier to use Word, which at least has keyboard format shortcuts. I tried and i can't do this simple format effectively anymore:

h1. Day...

*+Person+*

*Yesterday*

*Today*

Please bring back the markup view...

Matt

Have you tried Autoformatting? Confluence 4 autoformats wiki markup for you as you type.

You can also insert wiki markup into pages. I created this short video for you to show how you can create the stand-up notes you provided above in the new editor:

http://screencast.com/t/COOZ0WqZlL

Also, I'd strongly recommend taking the time to watch the short demo videos on this page to get an idea of all the new features in Confluence 4.0.

http://www.atlassian.com/en/confluence-content-collaboration

Hope that helps, mate.

David Dube

When I saw the new editor at Summit I was very impressed. I did have ne question then which I could never get a solid answer (granted I only asked a few people)... I should really install a local copy to test it out...

That said... how do you go back and edit complex macros? For example, I have several examples of nested reporting macros... I'll undoubtedly have to go back and add/tweak/modify one of the reports... even something simple like adding a new column to local-reporter, let alone tweak/edit a text/date/number filter.

How would you go about tweaking an already coded "complex" macro instance?

Dave

Matt

Hi David - I believe you are referring to the Reporting Plugin from CustomWare. CustomWare have yet to upgrade the Reporting Plugin for 4.0. All that's means is that Reporting plugin macros will not be repesented with Macro Placeholders yet.

I don't know yet how CustomWare plan to represent complex plugins in 4.0 but know they are working on it. Until thewn if you have plugins like the Reporting Plugin which are not yet 4.0 "copmpatible" and you do upgrade to 4.0 they'll look something like this in the new editor:

David Dube

Yup... I'm refering to the Reporting Plugin and is the main reason why I'm holding off upgrading. With that said, if it renders like the above pic in edit mode and still renders when saved, then I'd be a happy camper. I just need to pull the band-aid.

Matt

With that said, if it renders like the above pic in edit mode and still renders when saved, then I'd be a happy camper

I'd definitely suggest a test upgrade first on a staging server. Here's a great resource for everyone on this thread for planning for 4.0:

http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Planning+for+Confluence+4.0

Douglas Pierce

Hey Matt, no offencse, but the Autoformatting is relatively slow and very broken. Try to markup bold and underline using Autoformatting. Doesn't work. I think it is great to improve the editor, but taking away wiki markup really pisses off people who like using wiki markup. For certain tasks, the wikimarkup is faster to use. Now we just have the insert wiki markup. I want to return our 50 user license and get our money back. I certainly won't recommend confluence to anyone.

Matt

Autoformatting is relatively slow and very broken

Is anyone else experiencing pefformance issues with Autoformatting? It's not something that I have come across in my own use so I would be interested to learn about other's experiences.

Try to markup bold and underline using Autoformatting

That's an annoying little bug that I wish we had found sooner. Is there anything else you've found that doesn't work for you in Autoformatting, Doug?

Ellen Feaheny [

Looks like the online Sandbox was just updated to Confluence 4.0 - so... that's as good as any I think to try it out fast!

http://sandbox.onconfluence.com/dashboard.action

dvayanu

So, one week later.

I was working a lot with the new editor in the last week. I can do most of the things I need. Many of the things are going smoother. Table editing is much easier. Image positioning is ok. All in one I don't miss the wiki markup except for:

1) copy & paste in tables is completely broken.

Take simple table, enter two values:

&lt;tr&gt;

&lt;td&gt;app01&lt;/td&gt;
&lt;td&gt;172.20.255.65&lt;/td&gt;
&lt;td&gt;&amp;nbsp;&lt;/td&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;

Now take another row and copy the ip adress into a cell:

&lt;tr&gt;
&lt;td&gt;biz01&lt;/td&gt;
&lt;td&gt;
&lt;table style="margin-left: 0.0px;"&gt;
&lt;tbody&gt;
&lt;tr class="confluenceTr"&gt;
&lt;td style="text-align: left;margin-left: 0.0px;"&gt;
&lt;p&gt;172.20.255.67&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/td&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;&lt;/tbody&gt;&lt;/table&gt;&lt;/td&gt;
&lt;td&gt;&amp;nbsp;&lt;/td&gt;&lt;/tr&gt;

wtf? What does this additional table does here? And, how can I remove it?

2) Picture sizing

Take a picture, upload it and size it via one of three relative size buttons, take the smallest one for example.

Take another picture, which is slightly different in size from the first picture.

Now try to make both pictures have same width.

Gave up? Now replace the first picture with a smaller one. The sizing turns to be absolute based on the previous total size of the picture.

Why can't I just simple enter the size I want?

3) copy and paste a log of text/markup

Absolutely impossible.

4) Broken tables

I have a broken table (one row is incomplete and has less columns) left over from 3.5. No chance to repair it.

All in one... I can work with the new editor and it has an overall enjoyable ux, but there are a lot of small errors which can be corrected in the source format, but can't

in the RT Editor. I think Atlassian must provide an easy and convinient possibility to edit the storage format directly.

Otherwise they will probably need one year to resolve all the bugs and tweak the new editor.

Still, its better than my first impressions was ;-) And the new editor is awesome, at least for a wysiwyg editor.

So, as Barney would say, I stop being sad, and be awesome instead ;-)

true story

dvayanu

err, and sorry for the formating of the last comment, can't figure out how to paste code properly here...

Matthew Erickson

Hi Leon,

You should be able to set the width of an image in pixels by clicking in the XXXpx on the left of the image property panel. Does that help with your image sizing issues?

David at David Simpson Apps

One more thing. They are listening intently, so viable improvements to the editor that they can glean from discussions here will likely make it into future releases.

My biggest wish currently is for Mobile Safari/iOS support, but that is likely only after iOS 5 is released.

David_Rosen

For those of us who use a Wiki specifically for the Wiki Markup functionality, what are some reasonable recommendations?

If we wait long enough, is it possible that someone will develop a plugin to allow editing Wiki Markup in a page that already exists?
Can we downgrade to Confluence 3.5 (if I..err 'we' foolishly upgraded without testing properly)?
As a last resort, does anyone have a reasonable alternative Wiki that is easy to migrate to from Confluence 4.0?

Please note, item 3 is not a flame request...I just want my data returned to me in the same condition that I left it in ;-)

David Dube

Did you happen to make a backup? If not, any chance you have s "snapshots" of your data directory? You could use either to jump back to 3.5.X.

Gary Weaver

The question is where did this discussion take place, so to answer, here is at least one of the places where this discussion took place:

http://forums.atlassian.com/thread.jspa?threadID=51646&start=0&tstart=0

Hope it helps.

Rob Moser

I think a lot of this discussion misses the point:

briburt

Bravo! Exactly our thinking. We, too, are looking elsewhere unless/until we get some indication from Atlassian that some soft of plain text/source editing will be brought back to the product. Luckily, we didn't just upgrade to 4.0 and are able to stick with 3.5 in the meantime.

Ellen Feaheny [

Hear your complaints - even myself, I still am getting used to the new Conf 4.0 way - but overall, I am pleased with the improvements.

Question tho - Do you think there should be a developer wiki and a business wiki?

Business users, who often have budgets to purchase collaboration systems - have a very hard time dealing with developer mode.

Atlassian can't grow Confluence to be an Enterprise-wide system, at the market-level, if it is mainly a developer mode system.

It is however very concerning that your admin is not working in a staging area for upgrades to an Enterprise system FIRST (or plugin validations, etc.)

Not the best of ideas for ANY system administration. These are Enterprise systems, not desktop/browser software upgrades.

Gary Weaver

The short of it is that Atlassian had to remove the wiki markup editor (except for inserts) because of the numerous support issues caused by the conversion back and forth between rich-text and wiki markup. Atlassian and others were heavy users of markup, so they built a rich-text editor that would be an easier transition for those that used and love the wiki markup editor. But this was not so much a new feature as a required change to decrease the number of support issues. They made the business decision to do this and took the risk to increase the product quality for new customers (and many existing ones that make the transition), even though they knew they would lose customers doing it. If you haven't, please read the discussion here: http://forums.atlassian.com/thread.jspa?threadID=51646&start=0&tstart=0

Rhyne Armstrong1

I am having issues with the lack of Markup, but I can't see my problems in the 2 pages of comments and back-and-forth.

1. Able to edit macros for undocumented and un-labled parameters - It seems that many of the macros have items you can specify in wiki-markup that aren't added as labels in their dialog.

2. Able to copy a page layout into a Template. I should be able to select the source for a page and add that to a global template. I can't figure out how to do that since one is WYSIWYG and one is wiki-markup. If you are going to take it away from one place, please make sure it is gone everywhere.

AM12

Please check:

https://answers.atlassian.com/questions/21735/occupy-confluence-markup-provide-a-wysiwyg-xhtml-markup-editor-to-edit-the-markup-source-of-confluence-4-wiki-pages

-AM-

espow uriah

i dont konw how to answer it,i just want to show my iphone 4 case

Robert Mark Bram

I love the new editor but badly want back the ability to write pure markup. For me, I would use Text Editor Anywhere to edit a page's content in UltraEdit, where I have a whole suite of macros, templates and other customisations specific for Wiki markup.. and in one revision they are all suddenly useless. The insert markup function doesn't help - I want to use markup on existing content.

Joerg Bencke2

sorry to put it bluntly : read the first comment of this thread.

Gary Weaver

This answer has a wealth of information as to why they made the decision, but just to post it again, here is the related forum thread: http://forums.atlassian.com/thread.jspa?threadID=51646&start=0&tstart=0

unknown

As an advanced wiki markup user, I've been very cross about the loss of it. They're not going to bring it back, but I have to give Atlassian credit for their relentlessly cheerful attitude in the face of abuse and scorn while they attempt to make the editor work for everyone.[1]

They're also introducing this: https://plugins.atlassian.com/plugins/com.atlassian.confluence.plugins.editor.confluence-source-editor which at least will let us get back to the source of a page so we can edit it.

Having said that, I am still angry and unhappy about the huge waste of my time that this decision has introduced.

(a) I didn't think it was broken before and I still want wiki markup back [2]

(b) I don't WANT to use my mouse for things I can already do in my sleep on the keyboard

(c) or learn a gazillion new weird and interesting keyboard shortcuts (like "shift + up arrow" to do, what? remind me again?)

(d) or work in XHTML.[3]

So, the choice is learn to use it, or go elsewhere.

[1] Much of which scorn and abuse has been from me because I (still can't) believe they were serious. I thought they'd come to their senses, realise how evil it is and gracefully retreat. There's still time! Come back, Atlassian. We forgive you.

[2] OTOH, a lot of the XML/CSS/HTML people I work with truly despise wiki markup because of its stupid handling of code. Eg a slash \ escapes a semicolon ; but \\ doesn't escape another \. And it's impossible to highlight a section of code, say in a different colour to point out a specific noteworthy bit.

[3] The same class of techie users all went "Oh! How interesting" and smiled when I said it's going to be XHTML underneath now. So maybe it's not all bad, especially if the new editor actually works.

Gary Weaver

I don't WANT to use my mouse for things I can already do in my sleep on the keyboard

This is what I thought, too, and learning something new is not only a pain but a cost in time. However, this change was warranted, even if it wasn't totally desired. Technically, the conversion between the WYSIWYG/rich text editor and wiki markup in the old Confluence didn't work properly and would never work properly. That was a major cost to Atlassian support and a drag on users. Atlassian spent a good deal of time working on this issue, and the best they could come up with was to form a hybrid- something that was the WYSIWYG/rich text editor that supported quick editing of documents via keystrokes in a very similar way to that which was previously offered.

I'm absolutely sure that Atlassian hears and feels your pain. I just look forward to the day that everyone either gets cool with the new keystrokes and editor, or Atlassian comes out with something even more amazing that solves all of the world's problems. I loved the wiki markup a lot, and it should mean a lot to Atlassian that everyone loved wiki markup and Confluence so much that when they took away the full editor, it was like it was ripped from our souls. However, it's time to read the forum thread, read all Atlassian has to say about it, and move on. Maybe we could request that Atlassian come up with some new type of markup that would be a true 1:1 with the RTE and would magically never have conversion issues. But aside from that, the old markup just isn't compatible, and never was.

Graham Hannington

Wikifier RT is a web page that converts Confluence 4 rich text editor content into wiki markup. It's not perfect, but I hope that people think it's better than nothing, rather than just a waste of their time.

If Wikifier RT does not correctly convert your content, feel free to let me know (contact details on the help page).

Graham Hannington

I have developed a Greasemonkey user script that adds a Wiki markup button to the Confluence editor toolbar. Clicking the button displays the page contents as wiki markup in the Wiki Markup dialog.

Bob Swift

Nice !!!

Brian Gallew

So, what's the answer for auto-generated content? When the wiki is your primary source of documentation, you need to be able to insert machine-generated content.

Bob Swift

Please ask your question as a separate question.

Steve Ragle1

Were we the only ones who used to copy / paste a lot back and forth between jira and confluence since they shared a simple common base markup language? That is broken now.

Kathleen Newman

I am a bit frustrated about the expandable wiki menu I am coding and using. I cannot make it so it has 2 or 3 levels or sub categories underneath it. The wiki code menu seems very limited in its capability. Also the main drop down topic can't link to anything either.

Also this weird natural menu is showing up above that. Is there any information on how to code these menu's?
It is slightly frustrating not being able to do more with wiki code.

How do I get a hold of support. I really need to speak to someone about being able to configure a better working main sidebar menu.

Thanks,

Kathleen Newman

menu[1].png

menu.JPG

Kathleen Newman

Can a user code a sidebar menu in the html code? If so, how? Are there any examples? Thanks.

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