2019: All Wrap(ped) Up Like a Present

155 comments

David Revilla
Contributor
December 11, 2019

@[deleted] Thanks for guiding me to the plug-in, still, I have my doubts about the strategy of putting a functionality as common as this one behind a paywall when the market rivals all already offer it

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Tom Crowley
Contributor
December 11, 2019

@David Revilla There is a way of doing it via API if you're desperate to clone a space or massive number of pages or something that I've used a few times. It's a bit of a pain, though.

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Deleted user December 11, 2019

I have an aversion to pain, which goes some way to explaining why I'm so stressed out about the new editor.

I use Copy Page Tree several times a week, and it works like a charm. My company management agrees to the price of subscription, so I'm unwilling to lobby Atlassian in what would be akin to throwing eggs at a 50-feet-thick concrete wall. Such requests go unnoticed because they are filtered out as being not in Atlassian's interests.

David Revilla
Contributor
December 11, 2019

Well this just shows the attitude Atlassian have towards their costumers

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Jessica Taylor
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
December 11, 2019

@K R Ramakrishnan - You can find more information about tracking tasks in Confluence here: https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/add-assign-and-view-tasks-590260030.html

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Bob Sovers
Contributor
December 11, 2019

@Dave Sugrue -- The way that I got my first "Old-Editor" page was to use the How-to article template, to create a dummy page.  The auto-generated summary "How-To Articles" page used the old-editor and provided me with an old editor page that I could copy.  

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Devereux Seear
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December 11, 2019

I've been using confluence for a couple of years now and it leaves others in the dust ! thanks for the hard work ,  time and effort put into this amazing product , cheers Devereux.

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Dave King
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December 11, 2019

Congratulations on all the changes you made in 2019. With all you have done, it seems a product rebranding is in order - I suggest "Effluence".

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Daniel Harrison December 11, 2019

The new features are fantastic, a shame they do not work half the time.

However, what about all of the other helpful features that you have removed?  And the numerous bugs of the new features?  Or pushing updates that break older features?

(Don't even get me started on disallowing duplicate page names). 

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Mike_Schinkel
Contributor
December 11, 2019

This is all really interesting to read the comments. FWIW Atlassian, I love the new editor and am encouraged by the pace of change.  Keep it up!

And as someone who has hated Confluence prior to the new editor, I am really interested in knowing what features are missing now that were previously there that everyone is complaining about?

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Shannyn Johnson
Contributor
December 11, 2019

@Mike_Schinkel things like the layouts, being able to have a single section as well as multi sections, being bale to move sections. The ability to change your table size before adding it has been brought up. They limited the colors of the fonts so I can no longer match my company colors for documentation. Maybe it is hidden somewhere but I haven't seen an indent button on the new editor. 

If you only ever write in one block of text, the new editor is probably fine, and there are some good things about it but it doesn't seem like they consulted any customers before making these changes. 

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Mike_Schinkel
Contributor
December 11, 2019

@Shannyn Johnson Thanks for the details. 

I guess Atlassian have been caught between different types of customers; heavy users and users who were trying to get their company to abandon Confluence.

I had been pushing real hard to move from Confluence to Notion until Atlassian released the new editing experience. I felt like I could never get a document to be readable because of the 2000's era fonts, layout and editing experience that old Confluence had. And Confluence used to be horribly slow.

Now I feel a lot better about using Confluence and am no longer pushing to switch to Notion.

But I guess if existing customers like you had things working before and now they do not then that could be a real problem for you. Hopefully Atlassian will resolve it soon and we can have the best of both worlds.

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Jeannine Hooper-Yan
Contributor
December 11, 2019

@Mike_Schinkel - the big one for our organization is being able to link to existing attachments and display the link as text instead of as an icon.  We use Confluence for our ERP projects.  When we have to create a file (Word, Powerpoint, etc) we load it once and then link to it on any page that needs it - maintaining a single copy.  And since we are usually linking to the document as a reference in line with the text on the page, we display the link as text.  Think spec document submit the the vendor linked with meeting notes, testing results, etc.

In the new editor - you can't do that.  You can only upload a new file and display as an icon.  No way to link to a file already loaded in Confluence.  This basically blows up one of my main standards for managing information.  What makes it worse is the load once/link where you need went from being an Atlassian recommended best practice to "not in the roadmap"

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jeremy
Contributor
December 11, 2019

Interesting to hear about the use cases that are broken with the new editor. The issue with linking to attachments does seem frustrating. I guess Atlassian has made a call to satisfy the masses while potentially alienating power users. Hard decision but I have an inkling that the old solution was a mass of tech debt and was growing unmaintainable. It would be nice if they could keep the legacy editor there until reaching feature parity. @Jessica Taylor why wasn't that an option?

Personally I've been using Confluence for 7 years and have felt no pain with the new editor. I really like the new features particularly the table feature. The slash command makes it much easier to add widgets - I always used to forget the syntax for adding dates etc. Now it's easy.

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Michael Corvin
Contributor
December 11, 2019

@jeremy  - some of the ui aspects are indeed improved and at first blush the table editor appears to be better, the shortcuts are perhaps simpler - but deprecating the old shortcuts makes switching between Cloud and Server feel like a whole new tool to learn for our users.

The things that are lost that were essential to us were, e.g., links to attachments on other pages impacting, images, PDF, Office files, etc., (which other commenters point out is essential to them too), nested macros, nested tables, nested macros inside nested tables, etc..   The bugs with the hyperlink insertion and its formatting are also annoying.

I've actually given up on tracking all the problems and have told our users not to bother using Cloud for anything critical or worry about formatting.

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Kyle Beckwith
Contributor
December 11, 2019

We lost the ability to indent text which includes all controls you add a pages, please address this. 

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Wayne Tang
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December 11, 2019

This is interesting!

Ramita Rajaa K
Contributor
December 12, 2019

Can you please allow commenting while editing? This would make my work life so much easier. I wouldn't have to keep two separate tabs open (one to see comments, one to edit them simultaneously) for every doc. 

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Tom Crowley
Contributor
December 12, 2019

@Ramita Rajaa K There's a ticket open for this. I can't remember it off the top of my head, but if you search the Cloud tickets in Jira, there's one open. I'll see if I can find it in a minute.

xJon Finn December 12, 2019

Can we have the old editor back?

The new editor may or may not be great for people who work on mobile, but I don't work "on the go": this is my full-time job.

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Tom Crowley
Contributor
December 12, 2019

 

@Jeremy and @Mike_Schinkel, if you find these comments interesting, read those on the November and October release note pages and the "Try out the new editing experience" page. We've spent the past few months doing nothing but elaborating on our use cases. 

Some of us do not just create "pretty simple knowledge base pages", we use it to produce complex documentation. There are whole lists of bugs and complaints on numerous pages around the Community. Keeping the legacy editor alive is something we're campaigning for; the new editor has potential, but is years away from being a direct replacement, and would need a directional rethink before Atlassian make it so anyway.

I'm glad it works for you, but it really does not work for many of us. Atlassian might be "satisfying the masses", but they are preventing some of their existing customers from using software they've also been using for many years. And it's not just power users. Wanting more than seven font colours does not make me a power user. Wanting to put borders around images, or put warning panels in lists, or add inline images... These aren't power-user features. 

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Tom Crowley
Contributor
December 12, 2019

@Ramita Rajaa K Here is the ticket for viewing inline comments in the editor: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-36956 (Gathering interest, 271 votes, created in 2015).

I think this is the one they are tracking, so ignore the other three.

Ramita Rajaa K
Contributor
December 12, 2019

Thanks, Tom. However, this ticket has been created in 2015 and it is still 'Gathering interest' 5 years later. That's ridiculous!
I hope the team takes this feature up soon. It's very painful otherwise.

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Tom Crowley
Contributor
December 12, 2019

@Ramita Rajaa K Yes... Yes it is.

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Mike_Schinkel
Contributor
December 12, 2019

Thanks to those who answered my question.

Yes, it does some pretty awful to be in your situations. Hopefully Atlassian will listen and provide the legacy editor until you no longer need it.

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