A new way to write blog posts

[#1]

Hello,

I’m a product manager with Confluence Cloud and I wanted to let the Community know of some exciting improvements to how you create and edit in Confluence. 

We're rolling these changes out gradually, so for now you'll only see them when creating a new blog post. This should appear on your site in the coming weeks, if it hasn't already.

Some highlights:

• Improved typography, to provide a more readable line length. No more w i d e text on large monitors.
• We've added some great new image controls, so you can now easily wrap text around images to the left or right, or even go wide with banner images.
• Add 🌶to your page with emoji. Hundreds available, but you can even upload your own.
• Have a bunch of text in markdown? Just paste it on the page and it'll automatically convert to rich text.
• Need to include code? Code is now available in the plus menu. We'll even detect code on paste, and create a code block for you.

We've also focused - importantly - on increasing reliability, stability, and speed.

We'll be continuing to roll out further improvements, but there's enough great stuff that we wanted to start getting it into your hands. Our documentation has more details about exciting things to come as well as a list of changes that have already been made. 

There are a few notable things missing that we're working on, including:

• Pasting links to Confluence pages don't auto set the title
• Text alignment and indentation 
• Multi-column layouts
• Setting your image size in pixels

We'd love to know what you think! Click the "Feedback" link in the bottom right corner of the editor.

[Thomas Schlegel]

@Avinoam - the images are broken

[Harneet Kochar]

@Avinoam How do I use HTML markup in the new release ? 

[Deleted user]

Hi there, a couple of questions about the new blog post format. The new posts are now being centered in the page, leaving a lot of white space on the sides, especially on the left of the page. Is there a way to format the blog so it occupies the entire page and all the information can display better. 

[Pablo Marin-Garcia]

Great work! but there is something I am missing a lot in the new editing tools. Despite the new way of preconfigured panels for info, warning,etc. is ver helpful for writing some technical documentation in final format, I am missing the plain {panel} behaviour in the new /panel widget. I was using {panel} as a container to paste large content with images, and keep separate from the next block or my own annotations. The new panels do not allow pasting content with images. The panel ends above the first image and the image and rest of pasted content is rendered outside the panel. I can achieve the same block effect adding a single cell of a table but in the new editor inserting only one cell means, insert a table and remove two columns and two rows one by one. It is too much distraction compared with the simple {panel} typing on the old editor. 

Is it possible to have a simple /panel as before? and one that you can edit the title as well?

[Deleted user]

I recently learnt about the great "Decision" macro but cannot seem to figure out when it is available and when not... (see link below)

Is this perhaps caused by the roll-out of these editor changes?

As a product owner/project manager, not being able to capture (also small) decisions is quite a impediment.

P.S. Also asked on the community but no answer there: Some pages do not have the "Decision" macro available?

[Mohamed Mohamedin]

Hi,

I'm trying to make our macro compatible with the new editor. Can you point me to a migration tutorial. We want to be ready when this editor is generalized.

Thanks

[Victor Debone]

Hi,

Will this powerful editor be available for other pages than blogs?

[Ben Arundel]

how do I get the text to alight to the left? why is it in the centre? 

[stormmore]

I really wish the blog post editor was the same editor for the rest of confluence. It is an inconsistent experience and blocks the ability to write blog posts on the mobile client!

[Dan Streeter]

Hi, I've been advised by Shannon Spaniol to refer her rather than on another community post as all comments are tracking here instead. I'll copy verbatim so there is no crossover of comms between the two sources:

The other post is here, and was in context of changing back to the old editor.

Wow - you cant roll it back!? Thats AWEFUL!

The new layout is really a backwards step to documentation, yes, its more lightweight and 'focussed' - but some of us like to use the simple, basic text formatting tools like justification and indentation to name just two 'standard' features.

Not to mention you've seemingly removed the ability to use '{' as a shortcut for macros... which is a pivotal feature of writing content in Confleunce.

Yeh - theres a button to do it, but a 'meeting' is not usually a place where time can be spent carefully moving a mouse/trackpad around the screen to get to what you need, its fast paced: notes are taken at talking speed, and taking the ability away to rapidly type 'well known, used constantly throughout the day' shortcuts is a productivity killer.

Really Atlassian - a big fail on this one... taking tried, tested and known working functionality and process away from the users without a way back!

I've already raised feedback to the above, but sadly - in line with the majority of community feelings around Atlassians uptake of user requests... feel as though we're stuck with this new 'update'...

[colinb]

Would like to be able to toggle back to the old editor. The centering of content in the page is not helpful at all.

[Andrew Ashbacher]

+1 for being able to revert to old editor.  The new editor opted for aesthetics of content over functionality of content.  It feels to me like it's focused on marketing and sales teams, and less on product and engineering teams.  I hear the argument is that it now works better on mobile, but I would imagine that usage on mobile is secondary for most organizations.  Perhaps this change improves usage on mobile, but it has definitely made usage on desktop secondary.

There needs to be an option either at the space-level or page-level for which editor to use.  I used to really love Confluence and was looked to as a guru within my organization for helping others be effective with Confluence.  This change has added pain to my working day.  I am now on the search for other options for organizing and communicating information with others.

[Tom]

Is it really the plan to roll this out to ALL confluence pages?  I get the allure of trying to appeal to a hip young crowd, but what about your existing customers that have a large library of pages that are all about to look awful and all must be hand edited back to  a semblance of presentability.

Just to name a few issues:

• The Section macro.  We use it rather heavily across our pages.
• Full page width, instead of limited column space.
  • I'm not writing a blog, I'm documenting complex business and technical processes and I want my page width that allows me to format the document with sections and create whatever structure I needed for a given task. (Add a nav bar on the side, structure images on the right column, switch back and forth between 1, 2 and 3 column sections of the document, etc,)
• I can only anticipate more issues if this is rolled out to all pages, given I ran into these issues testing just one page pasted into the new editor.

Any company that has done a solid job of documentation with a long history of documents will be facing months of hand editing pages to get things back into shape.  I have real work to do, not time to clean up this potential mess.  If I have to go back and edit every page, BRD and Design we've made over the years, that's a staggering workload to drop on us.

If this will apply to all pages, this feature needs a toggle to disable the new format.  I'm just hoping I'm misreading things and this is either not intended to replace confluence pages or more features will be added to bring it up to parity before it is applied to confluence pages.

[Mike Thompson]

I've been using Confluence for years. Just joined a new company and created a new space in the cloud version. Moving page layout from the ribbon to the macros was a big mistake; it is used too often and the dramatic reduction in what is in the ribbon directly adds keypresses constantly. Also, the new macro for columns doesn't let you select 3 columns with the center larger than the sides. I don't understand what you're thinking. This is a HUGE step backward. Time to rethink Confluence vs. Teams.

[AndreyB]

No one has done so much wrong with product development as Mr. Zelenko
These are nested tables, and undo/redo buttons, and a new stub of the editor, and much more.

[Max Lorch]

Same goes here! I am currently thankful that our internal confluence is hosted by us...I just created for an external project a new confluence and what is wrong with that????

How can you do so much wrong with that? The tool was really good for documentation, now I really have to consider if I will need to find another product. People in Software and IT should work with that??? Don't know what you guys are thinking...