🎨 Add some visual life to your templates

[#1]

Hi Atlassian Community,

My name is Avni Barman, and I am a Product Manager on the Confluence Cloud team.

Based on feedback from you, we are giving admins more power to create templates that aren’t just useful but also visually appealing. Therefore, we are happy to announce that in a few weeks, admins can upload their own media to templates. You can add a logo, file, or any other image you would like to a template.

Learn more for a refresher on template creation.

And there’s even more visual bling for templates coming later! We’ll be giving admins the ability to go full-width and even add a cover image to their template. Cover images will come with an integration to Unsplash that will provide image options from their incredibly robust library. Keep an eye out for these two updates! 

Adding media to templates is currently 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 this new feature! Leave any feedback below in the comments and stay tuned for more features coming soon!

[Maurice Pasman]

You seem to be focusing on visual bling, that no one of your professional users are asking for.

What about restoring some of the features that were dropped from the new editor (or picking up some of the long lasting bugs) first? 

[G subramanyam]

More colorful confluence, templates and add a cover image!. Nice and thank you @Avni Barman 

[Marc Koppelaar]

Option the make a side wide announcement.

So please put the Announcement Banner option back. It's already returning in Jira, please do so in Confluence as well.

[Avni Barman]

@Maurice Pasman Thank you for the feedback, we appreciate it and will keep that in mind! Image support was a feature dropped in the new editor, highly requested by our customers, so we are excited to bring that to you all! 

[Maurice Pasman]

@Avni Barman I was referring to the features that weren't there before, like cover images and stuff. Also, posting happy messages about re-adding features that were deliberately dropped in 2019 does not really sit well with many of us.

[Mark Eskandar]

@Avni Barman - thank you for sharing this update. Unfortunately I do find myself thinking along the lines of @Maurice Pasman, that Confluence Cloud continues to show its limitations vs. Server. A significant gap still exists between these versions, the plan to close it is not clear. Voting often results in strong user support for issues that never see the light of day.

Increased visibility into upcoming themes and/or features would be greatly appreciated. Please be empathetic to the fact that Cloud continues to be a step back feature-wise compared to Server. This is still the case after multiple years of Atlassian trying to close the gap.

Transparency and visibility is key, though as a fellow Product Manager I appreciate your need to share only so much. I just suggest that Atlassian would do well to share more.

[Maurice Pasman]

@Mark Eskandar You captured the essence of my frustration. It just bugs me that every week (new) product managers post ecstatically about trivial stuff that has been (re-)added while I (and with me a large group of professional Confluence users) feel left in the cold.

It annoys me to no extend that something simple like responsive tables is still not there. I have pages with 2 column tables, that now show full width and still have a horizontal scrollbar. This can no longer be considered an enterprise level platform and it explains the increase in popularity of alternatives, like Notion. Atlassian has to step up here.

[Matt Reiner _K15t_]

It will be nice to have this feature in our templates (just as we're moving in earnest).

Rebuilding a platform for the Cloud is rough, one brick at a time. It's great to have another brick in place.

[Maurice Pasman]

@Matt Reiner _K15t_ How do you mean "Rebuilding a platform for Cloud"? It was already there, and it was working fine 2 years ago, before they tore it apart by pushing that crippled excuse for an editor, all for the sake of creating (yes, again) visual bling.

[Matt Reiner _K15t_]

@Maurice Pasman

Now, I'm no systems engineer, but I've worked with teams who have built, and built on platforms.

From my understanding Confluence on Demand (now Confluence Cloud) was originally Confluence Server, but hosted and administered by Atlassian. (This is an over simplification, but hey, that's what I do). This ran the same TinyMCE based editor we were used to.

But to really make a Cloud version of Confluence, you've got to move it from being a bunch of virtual servers running Confluence Server to a true multi-tenant architecture that can scale to an organization of any size.

That requires many "standard features" from Server be totally rebuilt. For example, check out the total renovation Cloud search just went through: https://www.atlassian.com/engineering/revamping-confluence-cloud-search

At the same time, Atlassian made the realization that their different Cloud apps were using custom and separate components, rather than sharing a single, customizable component/codebase. For example, when you used the Confluence editor, it was a different editor than the one in Jira, Bitbucket, etc. (Sorry, can't find the blog about this one 🤦🏻‍♂️)

This meant they had to sometimes totally rebuild features to utilize this new component system. It's a slow and painful process, which I saw Salesforce go through when they released the Lightning component system.

The Cloud editor has been rebuilt from scratch to look nice, yes, but to also fix a lot of underlying issues that just couldn't be "fixed" in the Server editor. (It's a wonder to me that they got collaborative editing to work at all. Bless you Synchrony team, bless you.)

Am I, for example, unimpressed with the lack of basic API support for new features that are announced? Yeah, totally.

But appreciate all that has to be done to build a true multi tenant platform. It looks like a lot of steps back, but it's really taking a short term step backward to take a big leap in the future. Like in the case with the rebuilt search. Now the groundwork has been relaid, we should expect much more impactful improvements because it can scale.

In the meantime, we have to stand back and watch Confluence seemingly lose features and then gain them back. I just trust there's a lot more work going into the platform that we can't see. #roughtimesahead #bettertimesahead

[Maurice Pasman]

@Matt Reiner _K15t_ you are cutting them too much slack ;-). I have been working in product development all my life, if there is one thing I have learned, it is "don't f*ck with the customer". I believe this to be one of Atlassian's slogans, too (sic). I would appreciate a little openness on the topic, not playing nice with new features that no-one really needs, while people are screaming for attention in numerous Jira tickets.

[Sarah Elmer]

This all sounds well and good, but whatever you do DO NOT CANCEL OUR USE OF "MASTERS"! When you decided to scrub Confluence in 2019 and creating an entirely different software, you took away nearly every aspect that we used. So I took previous "pages" and made masters so that I could keep uniformity. That is how I am currently using Confluence, not with all the "oh, look! we've done this!" that has been produced, but with my "masters" that actually work for what I need. Confluence is used by many different "cultures" and I'm sure my culture is different than others. What I need and what it currently can do are definitely 2 different things. Thank goodness I have my "masters" to work with.

[Kenichi Abe]

@Avni Barman,

Thanks for the nice feature.
Will REST API support attaching files to a global template?

[Mirko Schäfer (Seibert Solutions)]

I totally agree with @Maurice Pasman :

The power and keypoint of Confluence is collaboration and its corresponding features like inline comments not only in text passages but also in attachments.

This feature is currently not working. Please stop working on layout and visualization features and move your focus to the basic and elementary functions which have already worked in the past (with the old editor).

[Simon Clark]

@Maurice Pasman I take a degree of umbrage at being classed as non-professional.  As a matter of fact, I am very pleased that we have the ability to embed an image in a template.  This is going to simplify a lot of things for the users on our system.  I wholly agree there are loads of things that it ought to do, and I don't buy the stuff from @Matt Reiner _K15t_ about re-engineering.  It shouldn't have been launched if it didn't work.  

Where for example are calculated columns, sums, counts and averages?

Rome wasn't built in a day, but it shouldn't have needed building at all.

[Dieter Eichenseher]

Finally solved - thank you

[Jasmine Andrews]

Is it possible to swap out the Unsplash library with links to our own corporate image library?