🗂️ Announcing Folders in Confluence! 🗂️

[#1]

👋 Hi Confluence Community,

About a month ago, we announced a beta of folders in Confluence. We had enormous interest in the feature (so much so that we had to close the beta to new customers!), and our wonderful beta community provided us with incredibly helpful feedback.

Since the beta launch, our team has been hard at work preparing the feature for its general release, and we’re thrilled to announce that we are in the process of rolling 🗂️ folders out to all customers in all editions.

📣 The rollout process is fully randomized, and we do it in stages to ensure that there are no performance issues or critical bugs. Folders should be available on your instance within the next few weeks if they are not there already.

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Folders FAQ

For more information on folders, see our documentation.

Can I still use parent pages?

Yes! Folders are purely additive — this release has no impact on parent pages.

How are folders and parent pages different?

A folder is a simpler kind of container — it’s just a place to store your content. In contrast, a parent page is a container with a “Read Me” built into the container itself. Use a parent page when you want to provide additional information or context on what’s inside the container. Use a folder when you simply want to group similar content.

Based on customer feedback over time, parent pages seem most useful in traditional knowledge base / wiki spaces, whereas folders seem more useful in project, team, collaborative, or hybrid use-cases.

Can I disable folders for my space?

Yes 😢. Folders are turned on by default, but space admins can turn folders off — or turn them on if they have previously disabled them — in Space settings.

Currently, it is not possible to turn folders on or off at the site level.

To turn folders on or off for a space:

1. Navigate to that space in Confluence.

2. Select Space settings from the sidebar.

3. In Settings, select Features (under Manage space). This option is only available to space admins.

4. Select the toggle to the right of Folders (under Content).

Can I convert existing parent pages into folders?

📣 This feature is currently in beta as we finalize performance and a few other nuances.

Yes! To convert folders to parent pages, follow these steps:

1. Go to the parent page that you would like to convert into a folder

2. Select the ... in the upper-righthand corner of the page

3. Select “Convert to folder”

When you convert a parent page into a folder, we are really just archiving the parent page and replacing it with a folder. Therefore, if you want to recover your parent page at any point, you can do so by going to Space settings > Archived pages.

Finally, if your parent page is empty or only contains the “Page tree” or “Child pages” macro, you will see a banner at the top of the page prompting you to create a folder, since many users have told us that these types of parent pages specifically are the ones that should most likely be replaced by a folder.

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We're eager for your feedback — please let us know what you think. You should see a feedback screen pop up in the bottom-left of your screen after creating your first folder.

- Ned, on behalf of the folders team

[Dave Mathijs]

I'm a classic organizer so I do welcome this feature.

[Steffen Burzlaff _K15t_]

@Ned Lindau great feature for Confluence and I'll definitely replace a lot of parent pages with folders. One question - do Folders show up in the Confluence search? I assume they don't since they don't have any content on them?

[Mark Bayly]

Any best practice advice to go along with this? Why and when would you use folders instead of the current structure. So you can put pages inside a folder - same a parent page yes?

[ALICE CAUDY]

Hope to see "folder action" in Automation : 

• convert existing empty parent page in folder for multiple space

I think the teams will win time.

[Ines C]

Hello there - Is there a timeline for the "Convert to folder" option for parent pages? Thank you

[Danny Spell]

IMHO, empty parent pages were pretty pointless, so folders fill the need for grouping a set of pages under one umbrella (ella, ella, ella).

It is nice to have the option of parent pages or folders. 

In a situation where you have information that pertains to all sub-objects, it makes sense to me to use a parent page while subordinate objects can containerize their pages in folders within the parent page.

Thanks for providing this new feature.

[Thomas Berger]

I am wondering if a 'folder' are a type of custom content?

[John Stohel]

First I love Folders!  Parent pages existing for the sole purpose of holding other pages is silly. Thank you.

However after organizing our organizations spaces I ran into a MAJOR (for us) issue.

Folders don't show up in a projects "Project pages" section.

I would have expected to see folders with a caret symbol to access those pages, however I've found they simply don't exist. So now I'm going through our organizations spaces and removing my beloved folders because it's more important to see the page tree and have access to pages quickly within the project rather than force everyone to move into confluence for reference material.

[chrischen]

We had "folder" features before, then since a few days ago, seems this feature is gone...

There is no turn on/off In Settings, select Features for folders anymore...

Is this normal?

Or how we can get our "Folder" feature back plz....

We really love it.

[Eli Devlin]

The feature was toggled on in our site without our knowledge, I used it a couple of times, and now the feature has disappeared. 

So I have several folders, can't make more, and can't un-do the change. @Ned Lindau can you please clarify the strategy here?

[Ned Lindau]

@Eli Devlin @chrischen Hm, folders is rolled out to 100% of customers. You don't see the option the option to create a folder in any of your spaces? When did this functionality disappear?

[Eli Devlin]

The feature was present ~6 days ago, I had no idea until I saw it in the 3 dot menu looking for something else. 

So I used it ~5 times to make 5 folders. Then, it just disappeared - no longer an option in the 3 dot menu. I checked the project features menu and it remained toggled on. 

So last week logged this via Atlassian support live chat and was told that because it was in beta, nothing could be done. I don't have a ticket number to refer to for this conversation. I am fairly sure they said they were also affected, i.e. the atlassian support person also could not see the option in their confluence. 

[chrischen]

@Ned Lindau it is around Oct 14, my team members noticed we lost the "folder" feature, a.k.a there is no "folder" option click the "+" sign.

We had "folder" feature before that.

[Ned Lindau]

@chrischen @Eli Devlin please file support requests if you're still not seeing folders on your instances, and tell the support agent to contact me with the case URL in Slack. That's the best way to ensure we have your instance's information at hand and can dive into solving.

[Eli Devlin]

Hi @Ned Lindau I logged a case, was told it's been disabled due to an ongoing incident. 

[DOMINIC FORTIN]

Hello @Ned Lindau  !

I am glad this feature is now available. Thx!

However, I realize that it not possible to use the macro "parent/child" with folders🙁

Is this planned for the future?

[Abhinav Singh]

Hey @DOMINIC FORTIN !

I'm going to be the new PM for folders. The child macro currently lets you have folders as children, but doesn't allow you to select folders as the parent content. It is planned for the future, but we don't have a timeline update yet. As soon as we have it on our near-term roadmap, I will update you guys here on that.

Thank you again for great feedback. :) 

[Abhinav Singh]

@Eli Devlin - would you be able to please send me your case support ticket at asingh26 [ at ] atlassian.com? I will get our engg. team to check what's going on with your confluence instance and folders.

Thank you 

[Steven Lloyd]

Hello, Do we know if there will be functionality in the future where folders will be visible in the Project Pages section, or will this be a limited view for when accessing directly via Confluence, looking to let the team know if they should look to stick to using the page functionality as previously used, similarly as mentioned above

[Eli Devlin]

@Abhinav Singh OK I have shared the ticket to your email, thank you

[Raffaele D’Elia]

Hello, I love folders; they are much more intuitive than using empty parent pages for organizing content. However, I 'd love to have a macro to embed a list view of folder content (first-level items at least) in a Confluence page. Any chance to include that in the roadmap? Thank you

[Eric Benjamin]

+1 to Raffaele's comment - this is essential for our knowledge base before folders can become viable.

[Jon R]

I realised something was up when I tried to show all of the sub-pages of a meetings page in another page.  After some puzzling I noticed that this new folder functionality had been released and folder child is not selectable by macros :-(

I then tried clicking into the folder and it doesn't bring up the folder "page" and show sub-pages,

I have turned this off as I cannot see any benefit from this.

[Paul Wagland]

How does one convert from a folder back to a page? Let's say that you create it as a folder, and then decide you do want a landing page after all, how do you do that?

[Abhinav Singh]

@Paul Wagland - we don't have an automatic folder to page conversion functionality. Curious why would you need to convert back from folder to a page?