🔅 A better publishing experience is coming to you

[#1]

Hi Community,

I’m Lingyang Zhu, a frontend engineer on the Confluence Cloud team. Following our announcement that a new Confluence publishing experience was coming, I’m excited to share that this new feature is now rolling out! 

What did we build?

The Publish Dialog adds a new step into the flow on the initial publish of a page when it goes from Draft → Published. Within this dialog, users can choose where to publish and who can see the page.

You can also choose additional publishing options like scheduling the content to be published at a certain date and time or publishing as a page or blog by clicking More options.

When editing a document that has already been published, you can access and update the publish settings again by clicking the down carat (next to the Update button) to bring up the same dialog for adjusting these settings.

To change the page or blog location, click on the location field and select your target location:

To change access, click on the access field and select options from the dropdown menu, you can add/ remove users in the restrictions dialog:

If you’ve changed your mind and don’t want to publish anymore, you can always discard the changes you just made inside publish dialog:

You can also schedule for a page to be published later by selecting a date and time:

On an already published page, you can update it again with your existing settings by simply clicking the Update button.

If you want to change settings while updating, you can click on the down carat ( ˅ ) next to the Update button:

What about the similar options in the More actions (…) menu?

Since publish with version comment, schedule publish, and publish as a blog have been added to publish dialog, we are removing them from the More actions menu. However, we are keeping publish without notifying watchers and all the other non-publish-specific options there.

What does it mean to me?

You can now publish with confidence knowing exactly who will (or will not) be able to access, view, or collaborate on your page. This simplifies permissions management and brings a greater sense of control over content visibility.

When will I get it?

This feature is currently still rolling out so if you don’t see it on your Confluence Cloud instance today, it should come to your site soon. We hope you enjoy it! Please leave any feedback below in the comments and stay tuned for more features coming soon!

[Barbara Szczesniak]

Wow! This seems to solve issues of having a working space and a published space, since I can do write/edit/review/edit/approve in my working space and then publish the approved page to the space my readers will use.

@Lingyang Zhu Am I interpreting this correctly?

[Lingyang Zhu]

@Barbara Szczesniak You are right! With publish dialog you can publish your work to a different space - you can start your work in your personal/ working space, and once ready, publish it to a team space!

[Barbara Szczesniak]

@Lingyang Zhu When I publish my page to my team space, will it overwrite the previous version of that page in the team space as a new version?

[Lingyang Zhu]

@Barbara Szczesniak When publishing to another space, what it's actually doing is to move along with a publish. In this case all the version information will be kept as is, and once the action is done, it will create a new version on top of your existing version. 

Say you have been working on a page in space A, and it have 5 versions, upon selecting space B in the publish dialog and clicking update, your page will be moved to space B, and have 6 versions. 

[Fabrice Huart - NSI]

Hi @Lingyang Zhu ,

Thank you for that great news.

Some questions regarding this new feature :

• When publishing, are you creating a full copy of the "source" page to the new destination ? 
• What happens to images, videos, attachments, Whiteboard, etc .. that are on the source page that is published ? 
• Do you support data from Marketplace Apps also ? 

• Is it (or will be possible ) to publish :
  • a hierarchy of pages ?
  • a full space ? 

Thank you,

Fabrice

[Lingyang Zhu]

@Fabrice Huart - NSI 

When publishing, are you creating a full copy of the "source" page to the new destination ? 

• Not sure what do you mean by "source" page, when publishing, if you selected a new destination, the page you are working on will be moved over, its parents will stay as is. 
• I would also call it move instead of copy, because by publishing a page to a new destination, it will disappear in its previous location, and show up in the new location.

What happens to images, videos, attachments, Whiteboard, etc .. that are on the source page that is published ? 

• Everything on the page will still be there.

Do you support data from Marketplace Apps also ?

• If the page have marketplace apps added, they should still be on the page after the action.

Is it (or will be possible ) to publish :

• a hierarchy of pages ?
• a full space ? 

For the last two questions I'm not too sure what are you asking, but -

• If you have a hierarchy of unpublished pages (or pages with unpublished content), publishing the root (or say shared parent) won't publish all the children, you still need to publish children one by one
• If you have a hierarchy of pages and you are publishing the root to a different location, yes all the children will be carried over to the new location, and all children will stay as whatever state they were, only their location will be different

Publishing a parent page to different location should move its children. However we are still resolving some bugs with this so it may not be working right away when publish dialog first reaches you

[Andy Gladstone]

This will really help users get over their fear of publishing. As mentioned in other comments the ability to work in one space, and publish to another, will remove a lot of the anxiety around creation of content in Confluence.

[Martin James]

A very important feature for us would be to add a classify page option to the list as well. This is something our company take very seriously. Not having a proper solution to classify pages is a nightmare. We plan to use the page status for this but having this feature built in would be incredible.

Example: 

[Aron Gombas]

@mybucket2018 I can see in your screenshot that you are also using labels to mark your page classified. Note that with the Better Content Archiving app, you can define a fixed set of custom statuses and let the app set the page's status based on its labels. 

You can, for example, set all pages to "Classified" statuses if the page is labeled with "classified". And you can inherit the status so that any page will be classified if any of its ancestors (parent, grandparent) is classified.

Plus you can search for classified pages, list them using macros, report on the number of classified pages, etc. It can make your work much more manageable. 

[Barbara Szczesniak]

@Lingyang Zhu According to this page (https://support.atlassian.com/confluence-cloud/docs/what-is-the-new-and-improved-publishing-experience/ ), this feature was supposed to roll out at the end of June. I am still not seeing this in my Cloud site. Has the date been pushed out?

Separate question:

This article covers what happens the first time the page is published (Publish button) and subsequent publishing (Update button). What about pages I've already published before this rolls out? Do you get the Publish Page dialog the first time you click Publish again?

[Lingyang Zhu]

Hi @Barbara Szczesniak - 

Yes the feature has started to rollout during the end of June, a small amount of sites should already have it, but we are being cautious about rolling out too fast as this impacts one of the core functionalities of Confluence - publishing a page. We kindly request your patience as we work diligently to bring the feature to you.

For the pages that has already been published before the rollout, they will get the publish dialog along with the Update button instead of the Publish... button.

[Matt Reiner _K15t_]

This looks great @Lingyang Zhu!

I love how accessible these once very hidden features will be! Can't wait to get it in our Confluence.

Also, made a quickly sharable video about all the excitement, https://youtube.com/shorts/i81MSyLLsfw

[Lingyang Zhu]

@Matt Reiner _K15t_ Thank you so much for the video! 

[Brat]

In earlier announcements there was a "notify others" checkbox, why didn't this make it into the final implementation?

We intensively trained users to use "Publish without notifying watchers" for minor changes like typos which are completely irrelevant for watchers.

Since a) "Publish without notifying watchers" is pretty hidden and b) not available for initial publish we really had high hopes for this release...

Please consider readding this useful checkbox to the dialogue.

[Steve Bates]

Is there a way to revert to the old publishing experience?

In order to foster collaboration I need all users to be able to edit all pages in a space.
I dont want users to be able to create pages that others cant edit.
I've set the space permissions so that no users have the ability to set restrictions.

Users using "New Publishing" experience can now bypass that control for pages that they create.

[Lingyang Zhu]

@Brat - Thank you so much for the feedback! Glad your team found the "Notify others" option useful. 

My team has been discussing this and decided to temporarily take it out, I don't have a concrete answer of whether/ when are we adding it back, since we are actively discussing about it. 

However I will have an answer by the beginning of next week. Sorry for the back and forth on this option, as we try to make publishing less confusing and make creators feel more confident.

At the same time, you can use the "Publish without notifying watchers" in the ellipsis menu. For the initial publish, my workaround is to set access to only myself, publish, and then use the lock button to give everyone else permission to avoid sending notifications (sorry that it's way more complicated than just selecting an option).

I will keep you posted on any decision my team makes!

[Lingyang Zhu]

@Steve Bates - Thank you for the feedback!

Can you elaborate on how the users used the publish dialog to bypass that control? Did the user create the page in another space, and published in the space that they can't change restrictions? Or did the publish dialog not respect the space setting?

[michelle_bachmann]

Is this a standard feature or only for premium subscriptions?  We have a standard subscription and haven't seen this functionality be available yet.  

Side note:  It would be beneficial to note if features apply to standard and/or premium subscription with every article, or include appropriate tags.  This same confusion also occurs when we receive notices regarding new features to the JIRA and JSM tools.  If it does in this article, and I missed it, my apologies.  

[Lingyang Zhu]

@michelle_bachmann This is a standard feature for everyone.

However we are being cautious about rolling out too fast as this impacts one of the core functionalities of Confluence - publishing a page. We kindly request your patience as we work diligently to bring the feature to you.

[Brat]

Hi @Lingyang Zhu, many thanks for your valuable reply regarding the "notify others" checkbox. Are there any news regarding this? We're really looking forward for this.

[Lingyang Zhu]

@Brat Thanks for following up on this. We are still discussing about this internally and unfortunately have not come into a decision yet. I'll post an update here once we've made a decision to add it back or not, sorry for keeping you waiting. 

At the same time, please refer to this work around to avoid sending notifications to watchers on the first publish: 

-> Set access to only myself

-> Publish

-> Use the lock button to give everyone else permission

[David Becker]

I would very much like to have the ability to stage up multiple, different, scheduled publishes in advance. For a moment I got excited and thought this might let me do that, but no dice yet. Is such a feature being planned?

[Tami Dubi]

HI @Lingyang Zhu , 

This is great. It also enables us to use the "Create from template" macro more easily since the page that is created from this macro will not be created as a child page of the page that holds this macro (which was what happened until now).

I am following what Brat wrote.

It is important to have the ability not to notify others on the first publication. 

1. We have been using the workaround for months now, but it is something that you can't educate the entire company (same as adding labels). Anything manual and not part of a working flow isn't a sufficient solution. I would add the notify others as the default and a switch of "don't notify others" as an option.

2. I also saw that you dropped the labels. It will also be good to add the option of adding them as part of the publication process since people forget to add them. 

3. Where would I see the versioning comments? Only on the page history?

Thanks
Tami

[Fletcher Richman]

Hi @Tami Dubi I am curious to understand more the use case for not notifying watchers on first publish. Why is this important for you? 

To clarify - newly published pages only notify people who have chosen to watch a Space. Users that watch a space are doing so typically because they would like for all new pages created in that space to send them a notification. Enabling the creator to turn this off for their initial page creation actually goes against what the Watcher was looking for in the first place. 

[Harsh]

bumping @Brat 's comment about absence of previously working feature: "notifying others when publishing without version comment"

1. https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-articles/A-better-publishing-experience-is-coming-to-you/ba-p/2395090#M6231
2. https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-articles/A-better-publishing-experience-is-coming-to-you/ba-p/2395090#M6257

watching this page or if there is a better way to track the progress on that feature @Lingyang Zhu ?