Change to your content is in your hands

[#1]

Hey Community,

The Confluence editor team have been reading your questions on the Community threads and want to share a central source of truth for everyone regarding editor changes. Most importantly, we hope that this post clearly conveys our principle that change to your content is in your hands.

Disclaimer: If you are not a site admin, please speak with your site admin about the changes to your site. Messaging here applies mostly to site admins.

The legacy editor isn’t going anywhere

We know that many of you are concerned about all the changes and what they may mean for the future of the legacy editor. We have no plans to end-of-life it in the foreseeable future, and if and when we do, we’ll make sure to explicitly communicate it well in advance.

Confluence will not be automatically converting pages/sites to the new editor.

There will be no more default conversions without notice. Going forward, we plan to use the page conversion feature to move pages from the legacy to the new editor. This feature is opt-in only, meaning users choose whether or not they want to convert a page on a page-by-page basis. Furthermore, there’s an option to revert back at any time. As we see success in this feature, we hope to enable this as a bulk operation at the space or site level. That means space admins and site admins will be able to convert pages in bulk rather than going into each and every page. If you currently don’t have but would like to see this feature in your site, please fill out the form here.

If your site does not have the new editor, your pages will not default to the new editor without notice.

There is a small percentage of sites that do not have the new editor for various specific reasons. These sites will not be rolled into the new editing experience, especially without notice.

The legacy editor template can be enabled for your site at any time.

Most sites currently have the legacy editor template enabled. If your site falls within the small percentage of sites that do not, please reach out to Support for more information about enabling the legacy template.

Thank you!

The Confluence Cloud Team

[Meg Holbrook]

I think this is a huge step forward in the ongoing editor discussion. Admins should be empowered to make decisions that directly impact the day to day operations of their business within the products.

My hope is that this type of thinking continues with products like JSD cloud where we've had a number of significant (and not always wonderful) changes occur with little to no advance notice or ability to revert to legacy functionality. 

[Jimmy Seddon]

Great post @Tiffany!

Love the transparency and commitment in trying to make a more positive experience for users.

Looking forward to hearing more updates as they are available!

[LarryBrock]

@Tiffany and team - Many kudos for this clarifying statement and driving a stake in the ground for constructive conversation moving forward!

I encourage each of you to remain present and engaged in the Community and to in turn, encourage your fellow product teams to engage as well.  I promise - we don't bite! 😁

~~Larry Brock

[Jack Brickey]

@Tiffany& Atlassian Confluence Team,

I really appreciate the transparency and simplicity of your post. More importantly I am pleased to see that Atlassian is listening to their customers. I never doubted that you were but this post confirms it. While personally I love the new editor, I also appreciate the pains that many long time Confluence fans were vocal about. IMO, this is the best of both worlds and not a compromise. I want to encourage Atlassian to continue to evolve the product to deliver the best possible solution. Change is difficult but always necessary to remain pertinent.

Keep up the great work!

jack

[Chellie Esters]

@Tiffany YAAAYYYYY!!!!! This is wonderful news! We literally have hundreds of pages that we just moved from Zendesk in early 2019. The new editor — and all of its gaps — gave my team (and other Confluence users) a high level of stress that no cloud solution should ever do.

If you're running feedback sessions with customers, I'd like to be on that team. Please feel free to contact me if you're having such sessions.

Again, thank you for the wonderful news!

[Jaz Wilkinson]

@Tiffany is there anywhere we can see the features of the new editor or try how it works? We are not currently using Confluence as we were so frustrated with the limitations of tables - but if some of these issues have been addressed in the new editor would be keen to use Confluence again.

[Tiffany]

@Jasmine Wilkinson you can create a free new instance and create some pages/test out how it works there. This would be the best way to see the full functionality of the new editor. 

[Jaz Wilkinson]

Looks like there's still no way to re-order table rows :-( 
(Cutting and pasting content of rows is not the same thing.)

[Don Campbell]

Thank you @Tiffany_Chang & Atlassian Confluence Team.  To be honest I wasn't sure how much you were listening to us (your customers).  Now I know you are, and as such I look forward to the improvement and enhancements your team can introduce, knowing you will take our needs and concerns seriously - especially when it comes to already super useful features we depend on. 

Keep up the good work.

[Vincent Mann]

No more default conversions = great.  I really like the new editor as I've mentioned before, but this is an empowering change and in my view a good best practice in general.  

[Mads]

Thank you very much. Would it be possible to change the text in the create page dialog? Currently it says


"(old) (going away soon)" does not exactly communicate the same message as this blog post...

[chris]

I hope Atlassian changes its approach to rolling out changes in future - and I wish Atlassian would fix issues like this in a matter of days, not 12+ months.

[Tan Rong Wei]

Thank you for listening to your customers. Thank you for not wasting our efforts for those of us who have contributed thousands upon thousands of articles using your platform by allowing us to choose whether we want to change to the new editor or not.

[Susanne Schnitzer]

Thank you, we are very happy about being able to still use the legacy editor.

Just one thing: there is no possibility to create templates that use the legacy editor.

Creating a template always starts with the new editor. Can this be changed?

[Bob Bergman]

This is pretty big news for Marketplace Vendors offering cloud macros, as well.  Support for implementing macros that work well in both types of pages is _not_ good in Confluence now.  Please back this new statement up with solid support for vendors to be able to make Connect macros work equally well in both editing experiences.

[Thomas Schlegel]

That's great news and a big step forward. I appreciate the transparency and giving the responsibility to the customers.

It's another proof that Atlassian is listening to their customers as much as possible - as it was with the office macros before. 

[Robert Lauriston]

Where is Atlassian and what have you done with them?

[Ben Shuker]

This is the best news, we can now stop scrambling to find either an alternative to Confluence or to migrate to Server.

One more thing I would like to see is the ability for a site admin to completely disable the new editor, it's simply not fit for purpose for us and as it's the 'default' blank page editor, it's getting used which means we need to then delete and recreate the page using the old editor.

[Brendan Patterson]

Hi @Tiffany ,

Listening to customers is always a great idea so this is encouraging.

I'm very curious "what changed" such that Atlassian decided to switch directions here? And should we expect what happened in 2019 to repeat in terms of Atlassian again deciding to 'force push' a new editor or platform component which by most accounts still needs features and fixes?

We strive to assist bringing customers joy with our apps.   This became harder than ever in 2019 where we spent thousands of hours trying to divine, report then work around dozens of bugs in the new editor.

I DO think this is the right decision for customers.  Kudos for this re-direction in that regard.

I would like to ask if you can give some additional insight into the decision making process here?   It will help us better support customers in the future.

Cheers,

Brendan

[Vicki]

How can I opt to use the old editor when the display defaults to the new editor? Is there a tip or a trick I am missing?

[Thomas Barns]

Is there a solution to the issue where following an 'undefined link' from an old editor page tries to open a new editor page and breaks? (see https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-68165)

Can we set the old editor to be default in some way?

[Mads]

@SoupedUp App

Check my post above (the one with the image), or this discussion I just started here, about how to use the old editor.

[Randy Proctor]

Thanks for listening to feedback, and keeping the legacy editor alive.  Would it also be possible (or is there already a way) to access legacy templates other than Blank Page?  Perhaps there could be a drop-down option in the Create dialog to choose which collection of templates to display -- New, Legacy, or both.

[rod]

This is good news. Will there still be support over the old editor for bugs that are in it?

We are currently choosing to live with a bug instead of moving our reference pages that cannot be done using the new editor.

[r_karaivanov]

It would be really great to have a public document, which shows which features of the legacy editor are supported - or not yet - in the new editor. This can be of help when deciding whether to switch to the new editor.

For example, sometimes I am writing complex texts, where it is helpful to add an info panel to a list item (in numbered or bulleted list). Currently this is not supported by the new editor - I try adding the panel, and it shows below the list. So I keep using the legacy editor, where this feature works as expected.

If I am able to check whether features essential to my workflow have become part of the new editor, at some point I might consider using the new editor.