Change to your content is in your hands

[chris]

@[deleted]- but how to contact support? I have admin privileges over a confluence space, but all help/menu links simply point to this community for support. Months - or years - ago, I was administering a different account and raised a support ticket and they said I contacted wrong department and simply shut the ticket. I have commented on this thread earlier to tag Tiffany and others, but nobody actually makes the effort to enable the template.

[Rodney Hughes]

You can lodge your request with Atlassian support here: 

https://support.atlassian.com/contact

What you will ultimately get is the old editor as a selectable page template re-enabled in your system but not as a default page.

But note carefully Atlassian's statement

The legacy editor isn’t going anywhere ... We have no plans to end-of-life it in the foreseeable future, and if and when we do, we’ll make sure to explicitly communicate it well in advance.

so there is no guarantee how long it will still work for.

This was confirmed in my email exchange with them after I lodged my request for the old editor, Atlassian member Ricardo Nascimento, Cloud Support Engineer, stated in email telling me it had been enabled: 

but please keep in mind that this editor is going away at some point.

[Randy Proctor]

@chris -  I have no further suggestions for getting the legacy template enabled, but I can offer a short-term workaround that may help a little.  If you have existing documents that depend on the legacy editor, you can open a "new" page in the legacy editor by copying one of these documents, changing the location and name as desired, and removing all old content.  I believe this technique has been mentioned before in this community, so perhaps you're already aware of it.

Hope this helps.

[chris]

Thanks @Randy Proctor - yes - I have shared that solution here in the past, and that is our go-to. Just figured it might be better to improve the functionality of the 'create' button if I can, especially as we get new content editors on the team - using the 'create' button is the obvious path for creating new pages.

Thanks @Rodney Hughes - I will give that support link a try. And yes, I think it's naive to believe they will keep the old editor forever. I think a lot of users are going to be in a very tough place when they finally let the axe drop.

[chris]

To update - Atlassian does not provide support to free Confluence Cloud accounts.

Hence despite this post saying the (now-called) legacy editor is not going anywhere, and saying that it can be enabled as a template, to be chosen when creating new pages, they do not enable this for all accounts by default and they do not offer a means to request it for free accounts.

[Michael Simmons]

Good to hear this, thank you.

[Michael Migliori]

This a good step towards the end of the "editor tyranny": when big changes are introduced and they greatly impact a business (i.e. years of written documentation), the least you can do as an editor is to provide the choice of the upgrade and document the impacts of making the choice to upgrade.

All in all you will always find users that like the new stuff better and others that are attached to the old. But what is usually hard to understand and accept for most people is the removal of features, options or configurability. Funny coincidence, we were talking a few days ago with some colleagues about how we missed the good old days of the markup and how puzzled we were about the direction the product took by removing essential features such as markup as time went by.

Changing something by adding features or remodeling the feature without loosing it is usually a good option. However removing a feature is rarely a good option when it's widely used.

[Thomas Jones]

Atlassian recently forced us to migrate from Server to Cloud — aggressively keeping us to their timeline even as they repeatedly failed to keep it themselves, repeatedly postponing critical functionality like the calendar migration tool.  Today I tried to create a Cloud page with the "New" editor, and it is still clearly a hot mess, two years after this page was posted.

My page includes 16 attached spreadsheets that have the same information for different clients — the "preview" image is completely useless to tell them apart.  The legacy editor lets me replace a preview image with a simple filename text link.  The new editor seems to have dumped that capability.  When I tried basic format cleanup like inserting newlines between attachment preview images, the new editor deletes an attachment with every inserted newline.  Design flaws that silently delete existing content are terrifying, and I will be staying as far as I can from the "new editor".

If you're going to keep making it so difficult to use the "legacy" editor, please fix the new one.

[Robert Lauriston]

I've had no difficulty using the legacy editor. I never use the new "editor" since it breaks so many basic things.

[Rodney Hughes]

For Tom Jones

Whilst I don't like the new Cloud editor at all, to be fair, Atlassian never "FORCED" anyone to move from Server to Cloud.

Even with Server support coming to an end, we intend to keep using our Server instance at the latest version and we will not even change to Data Center.

[Mario Coluzzi]

The more I use Atlassian cloud the more I am convinced it is time to switch to a better cloud product. It is not only this "editor" feature that annoys me (BTW, how difficult is to implement a WYSIWYG editor?) But is the plethora of other not-so-working features that force a potential swear word out the lungs.

I am disappointed with Atlassian particularly with their extremely slow response in addressing issues.

[Aurel]

@Tiffany Please I'd like the legacy editor back, can you enable it in the template selection?

[Martin Rogers]

Are you really still 'considering' this after all these years?  You downgraded the editor, particularly for long standing, keyboard first power users and you have done essentially zero to fix it since.
Echo the suggestion above (Randy Proctor) - add this to the Create dialogue, at the very least.

[Martin Rogers]

@Rodney Hughes they effectively did, by withdrawing support unless you have 500+ users. This is what forced us onto Cloud, much to my disappointment 

[Togo]

Hello,
many thanks for the info - but HOW can the legacy editor be reactivated now ?

[Joe Bloggs]

@Togo I think you have to ask Atlassian mods to put a template of the old one into your space. Have a look at posts above, there should be a contact. I have it in mine and am here because was just reminded of how C*AP the "new" one is in a space where I don't have that template. 

[Roman Tarakanov]

Whilst I don't like the new Cloud editor at all, to be fair, Atlassian never "FORCED" anyone to move from Server to Cloud.

Even with Server support coming to an end, we intend to keep using our Server instance at the latest version and we will not even change to Data Center.

It's great if you can do this, our corporate policy would not allow using a software that is out of support.

We were everything but forced to move to cloud and with that move we lost significant amount of functionality. Close to no help from Atlassian, even when we reached out to our support reps. We basically had to figure everything out by ourselves.

We eventually got a few "face-to-face" meetings with Atlassian reps and they wrote down all of our concerns. But at this point I have no idea what happened to these concerns (it's been close to 2 years) - no communication back, no follow-up, no apparent action.

And we are not a small company either. Our group only has 200-300 users, but in the company we have dozens of 1000+ accounts with them. And this is a level of support we are getting :(

[shayne]

Can someone tell me what the new markdown workflow is? We used to just be able to insert it from the menu and at some point it disappeared?

I have a couple of hundred pages of markdown formatted documentation (Codeium is *really good* at generating this, protip) to go up and be reviewed but we cant work out how to get it in there anymore.

After all these years is it time to just move on and find a better wiki?

[stevemc]

Its definitely time to find a better wiki.  Atlassian and all their arrogance do not deserve the business they get.  But..  If you still have ability to create pages in the old editor (i.e like me you saved off a template or you beg someone at atlassian to enable it for you), the "insert markedown" feature is still there.  Else, try something like stackedit to convert your markdown to html and then paste that into confluence.

[B Gale]

I very much dislike the new tables interface, it is both inefficient (requires a drop down editor for features) and limited functionality (eg: lacks copy and pasting rows, inserting columns to the left).  It's as if the focus was on getting a MVP out, but not considering what the impact would be.  

[Peter Kidson]

Yes a major step backwards.  Unsizeable etc etc.  Best stick to the 'legacy' editor, which is years ahead of the new one.