Latest Blogs Updates: Simplified Navigation Awaits

[#1]

Hi Confluence Community,

We are thrilled to announce that we are in the process of rolling out changes to Blogs for all customers across all editions. These changes aim to simplify navigation and streamline your blogging experience.

What’s Changing

1. For spaces with blogs enabled, blogs will appear as a section beneath the content tree.

2. The blogs section will be ordered chronologically.

3. Blogs will be disabled in all existing spaces that have 0 blogs.

Note: Blogs will not be turned off automatically if the Blogs toggle has been enabled manually.

4. Blogs will be disabled by default for newly created spaces.

FAQ

How do I toggle Blogs On/Off?

If you are a space admin, follow these steps:

1. Navigate to Space settings.

2. Find the Features section under Manage space.

3. Toggle the Blogs option on/off as needed.

If you are not a space admin and would like to publish a blog in a space where blogs are turned off, follow these steps:

1. Navigate to Space settings.

2. Find the Space Details section under Manage space.

3. Contact one of the space admins listed under Administrators to turn blogs on.

Will these updates apply to personal spaces?

Yes, these updates will apply to all spaces, including personal spaces.

We’d love to hear from you! Feel free to share your thoughts and feedback on this post.

[Jana Baldermann]

Hi @Christian Martinez

thank you for the update!

What we are missing with the new location of the Blogs is the overview page. Thanks to Roberto from your support team, we have received a link to the overview page, which we have now temporarily added to the shortcuts.

However, it would be nice to be able to access that overview page directly when clicking on "Blogs". Maybe even opening an overview page of the respective year when clicking e.g. on 2024.

This overview page is a key feature of the blog for us as it allows us to share a link to all blogs as well as seeing the publication date and author of different blogs at a glance. Roberto has already summarized all this for us in a feature request: [CONFCLOUD-79780] Add the "All blogs" overview page to the new Blogs section under Content tree - Create and track feature requests for Atlassian products.

Are there any plans of bringing that overview page back?

Thank you for your support!

Best regards
Jana

[Becker_ Rene]

Hi

I understand why you automatically hide the Blog option (I do not like it, but I understand).

But why in the world would you automatically disable it in the "Features" section of the offending space and only allow space admins to re-enable it?

And do you hate us so much, that you do not implement a central switch to re-enable blogs? (or did I just not find it?)

With some 1.500 spaces and most of them not yet(!) using blogs, our 1 1/2 Confluence admins will have to either deploy space admins (... no!) or re-enable these blogs on a per space basis ...

Will you please at least implement a way to centrally disable this ... "feature"?

PS: lately you started to implement so many stupid things (App banners, users unwillingly creating instances, hide fields in Jira without asking, forcing service bots on ppl, 'databases' that are basically just tables w/o extra typical database features, still not fixing 'everything will reload via JS', ...) that you are pushing us away instead of drawing us closer. Maybe you can convince some of your managers to reflect on some of those decisions.

[Rebekka Heilmann _viadee_]

Hi @Christian Martinez 

I just got the first questions from my users on this. I don't personally use blogs so I had to do some digging to figure out what happened..

They need the Overview page just like @Jana Baldermann already mentioned.

Also, I noticed that Blogs don't appear in any of the Content Management tools. Cannot find them when I try to reorder pages, don't show up when I click "All content" nor in the Content manager. This is extremely frustrating. As an Admin, I have no clue how many Blog posts or Drafts exist in a space. Very unfortunate..

[Bryan.Katz]

Is there a way to shift the Blogs in the Nav panel to upper portion. It's now hidden on the bottom lower left, completely out of sight. We've always used the Blog feature for regular critical updates for our team. 

[Christian Martinez]

Hi @Jana Baldermann

Thank you for sharing your feedback! We know the blog overview page is helpful, and while it’s not planned for now, you can recreate it with the Blog Posts macro and add it to your shortcuts for quick access.

[Christian Martinez]

Hi @Becker_ Rene ,

Thanks for your thoughts! We understand that enabling blogs in many spaces can be challenging. Currently:

• Blogs are managed as space-specific features, like whiteboards and databases, and can be enabled in Space Settings or at space creation.
• If blogs were manually enabled in a space, they won’t be auto-disabled.

There’s no site-wide enablement setting at this time, but we’ll keep this feedback in mind.

[Christian Martinez]

Hi @Rebekka Heilmann _viadee_ ,

Thanks for reaching out! Currently, blogs are separate from content types like pages and are organized chronologically. Since there are not a content type, they are not included in Content Manager.

We aren’t exploring Content Manager integration at the moment, but we’ll keep your feedback in mind.

[Christian Martinez]

Hi @Bryan.Katz

Thank you for your feedback! We understand that blogs’ placement in the side navigation affects teams who rely on it. Right now, there isn’t an option to move blogs, but we’re actively exploring more customization options for the side navigation overall. We are currently focused on keeping content the top priority. 

[Becker_ Rene]

@Christian Martinez : thank you for your feedback. I hope I did not get the wrong person but steam's got to go somewhere.

[Jana Baldermann]

@Christian Martinez Thank you for the feedback! We have already added the overview page to the shortcuts. While this is a useful interim solution, it would be much more convenient to have the overview page where the blogs are. I'd appreciate if you could keep this in mind for future features.

[Ben Buchanan]

Please give us an option to put blogs back at the top, with a link to the overview page. We have use cases where the space is *primarily for the blog posts*. One size does not fit all.

[Bryan.Katz]

@Christian Martinez unfortunately the Blog Macro is a downgrade from the Blog Navigation. It would be very much preferable if it could be agile or put back at the top of the navigation. 

[Andy Gladstone]

Personally I am very happy with this change. In my organization Blogs were rarely used, and when they were, the user really intended to publish a page and chose the wrong modal. Making them hidden by default is a big improvement to the real estate in the navigation pane. Thank you.