Finding and adding powerful macros to your pages just got better!

[#1]

Hi Community!

I’m Jonno, a Product Manager for the editor in our cloud products. I’m here to announce that in a few weeks, an exciting editor update that makes it easier to find and insert macros that strengthen your content as well as a better experience when configuring macros!

But first, some context…

Over the years, we’ve come to understand the value macros provide you in better expressing your thoughts, ideas, and information. It’s how you truly unleash the power of Confluence to service your wide-ranging needs.

From talking to many of you, we’ve also come to learn that for all the benefit macros have provided, there are also a number of challenges. It became clear that at times they were unintuitive, disruptive, and out of date. For example, when editing a macro, the configuration box would appear over the macro itself, making it impossible to see what content you’re editing without opening a second tab or opening ‘preview’ over and over again. That’s no fun for anyone!

Well, we set out to change this. This is what we did…

Search and find macros more easily

We’ve overhauled the old-school + menu, giving it a lick of paint and bringing native, Atlassian-built elements into the macro searching experience. Plus this menu will now show ALL the options for editing in your toolkit, not just some of them.

It has also been overhauled to look and feel the same as the / command. A search field has been added to the top to enable a quick search of macros.

Edit macros, painlessly

To solve the problem of taking you out of context when editing your macros, we moved the configuration to the new side panel in Confluence. This aims to provide a far greater “what you see is what you get” (WYSIWYG) experience for you, enabling you to see the macro you’re configuring whilst configuring it.

Note: There are a group of macros that for the time being will still use the old configuration experience. Over time, we will convert all of these to use the new configuration, too!

We hope you’re as excited about this change as we are! Let us know what you think in the comments below.

[Sven Schatter _Lively Apps_]

Really like the new look and feel when editing macros! Great work :)

[Deleted user]

Big fan of the new macro editor. One issue though: From a UX perspective, it feels strange to change macro settings, then simply close the macro editor. I miss a "save and close" button to make sure all of my changes are safe.

[Hubert]

So this new editor will only appear in the cloud version? Not at the ("old") server versions?

[Andrew Kendris]

It's great to see the Confluence macros are getting some needed attention 🙂 kudos to the Atlassian team and looking forward to sharing this news internally! 

[Mia]

I'm excited! I love macros <3

[David Washburn]

@Jonno Katahanas do you know if some of the older macros will also be getting a modern look and feel? Macros like the child-page macro with rich view enabled look very dated and no longer fit the design aesthetic of Confluence.

Thanks!

[Jayachandran Anbalagan]

Excellent work.

[Christine Czerwinski]

Can we get this in the data center version also? Looks so great!

[Marcel van der Vliet]

I use a vertical screen for editing most confluence pages, so a dialog is much better than eating up a whole chunk of my screen to edit a macro.

[Capi [resolution]]

Yes! This goes in the right direction, which is minimizing the amount of time and interactions that take the user away from the page. More focus, less distractions, more quality work.

What I'd like to see at some point is the disappearance of the distinction between editing mode and reading mode or at least some kind of toggle between modes without having to reload the page.

[Vincent-Iray]

Hello Leica friends.It is great for me to be here.

[Tobias Peter]

This seems to be very good an comfortable.

From my point of view, however, it would have been necessary to take over the missing functions from the legacy editor first.
The new editor lacks essential functions that were never implemented.

Of course, this is not relevant for a user who has just started using the new editor.

However, it would be more than desirable to apply the priorities as in ice dancing:

• first the duty and then the freestyle.

[Marcel van der Vliet]

Tobias, you are soo right, but unfortunately Atlassian likes to forget the previous editor, so you have to learn to live with it. That is what I'm doing, better for your blood pressure :-)

[Tobias Peter]

Hi Marcel,

many thanks for your statement... less blood pressure is more important ... than the new editor ;-)

Unfortunately, Atlassian creates with this kind of developing unsolveable challanges for me.... this is really  ugly... and every support colleague understand me complete ... but this fix no problem :-(

[Gonchik Tsymzhitov]

The editor is awesome :) 

[Tobias Peter]

Hi Gonchik,

if you simply do not take the missing functions in the new editor into your consideration, ist is possible to talk about "awesome".
Unfortunately, this statement does not solve any problems by having thousands of sides with the legacy editor.

[Jonno Katahanas]

Hey @[deleted]! Thanks for the feedback. Not having a save button is something we’ll be monitoring. As we move towards a more modern, WYSIWYG editor, providing real-time updates to macros is a common ask from customers. It’s also a common design pattern many SaaS apps are moving towards (e.g. Figma).

That said, it’s an experience we’ll be monitoring closely as we rollout. We have different experience options (e.g. introducing a “done” button) we can move towards if it becomes a major friction point for our users over time.

Hope that helps!

[Jonno Katahanas]

Hey @Hubert and @Christine Czerwinski! This new experience will only be in our cloud products for now. There are no current plans to have it elsewhere. I’ll pass your feedback onto the DC team 🙂

[Jonno Katahanas]

Hey @David Washburn! This is purely an update to the configuration and browsing experience. We don’t currently have plans to update macros. 

[Jonno Katahanas]

Hey @Tobias Peter, thanks for the feedback. So that we can improve, would you be happy to share the missing features you’re looking for, and what you use them for? You can reach me at jkatahanas@atlassian.com. Thanks 🙂

[Jonno Katahanas]

Hey @Capi [resolution] ! Confluence is working on reducing the difference between the view and edit states by bringing the page tree into the editor. We don't currently have anything to share about having an always editable state like you've suggested.