Template Previews and Categories coming soon to your site!

[#1]

Hi Atlassian Community,

My name is Avni Barman and I am a Product Manager on the Confluence Tailored Experiences team! One of my top priorities is to help empower teams to create high-quality content faster.

Based on feedback from users, we are introducing a new create flow that now includes template previews and categories. With these new changes, you will be able to filter templates by category and preview them before applying a template layout to the page you are working on. In the next several weeks, we will be rolling out this improved template experience alongside the new create flow across all Confluence sites. The rollout will take about a month, and we will be sending email notifications to remind admins of these changes before your site receives the new experience.

If you’re a Confluence Cloud user, read on to understand more about how these new upgrades make it easier than ever to find the right template fast.

Creating Content Faster with Template Previews and Categories

With the ability to preview the template in the editor itself, we are helping you narrow down your template search faster, so you can get started on your work as quickly as possible. Moreover, previews allow you to get a sneak peek into the type of content you're creating and how to make the most of it.

With more than 10 categories to choose from, we want to bring you the right inspiration you need when creating content on Confluence. Imagine you are a marketing team lead looking for one place to create campaign plans. Instead of creating your campaign from scratch, you can leverage Trello’s email drip campaign template under the “Marketing & Sales” category. From product management to business strategy categories, learn the best practices for your role, and get right to work with one of our templates.

Feedback or Questions

Don’t forget to let us know any feedback or questions you have in the comments. We’d love to hear your suggestions on how we can make this experience even better for you!

[Juliano Júnio de Freitas]

Excelent initiative

[Lance Egan]

Any luck with enabling Space templates or copying capability for the Cloud version? Page templates are good, but lacking when it comes to standardizing something like company specific project level documentation requirements. Seems like the community has over 1600+ votes on related items. Seems like such a basic feature that should be built in and not rely on a plugin you have to pay someone else for.

[Maurice Pasman]

I am guessing this will effectively kill the option to create a page using the old editor?

[Ben Shuker]

I'm also concerned that this will remove the 'Legacy Editor'.

There are still too many features missing from the Fabric Editor for it to be usable for us.

[Andreas Hilbrich]

Will I be able to create my own templates further on? Is it the "Custom" category in the screen shot?

[Mads]

I would also like to express my concern that the fabric editor is not ready for general use.

It would be really great to fix the issues with the fabric editor.

[Avni Barman]

Thank you all for your valuable input and comments. Your input in the comments helps us understand how this affects you and what you're hoping to accomplish!

@Lance Egan I'm glad you are finding page templates useful! This suggestion is a priority for our development team, but I am not able to provide an accurate estimate for when this will be resolved. We will update this issue as soon as we can confidently project a release.

@Maurice Pasman @Ben Shuker @Mads We are currently releasing the new templates in the new editor only. Moving from the old editor to the new editor is a journey, so for now we are being mindful of our customers and not killing the old editor. Here is more information for what improvements we made with the new editor. Please do not hesitate to reach out with any specific concerns or pain points you may have about the new editor. We always appreciate the feedback!

@Andreas Hilbrich If you are space or site admin, you can continue creating your own templates. Your end-users can access these templates in the "Custom" category. As of today, template creation is reserved for admins. We will see how that performs and then consider expanding this feature to other permission levels. In the meantime, if you are not an admin, you always have the option to create your own templates in your personal space.

Please don't hesitate to contact me if you have any questions!

Thank You,

Avni Barman

Product Manager, Confluence Cloud

[Maurice Pasman]

@Avni Barman I appreciate your reaction. The thing is, we need the old template modal to be able to create new pages in the old editor.

If your are going to invert that order (so first start a new page, in the new editor, then let us choose a template) I don't see how I can still create a new page using the old editor.

[dwinkler]

@Avni Barman Thank you for your response.

With all due respect, if you're sincerely looking for "specific concerns or pain points," then you'd probably do quite well looking through the thread you posted. The one that's now shut down but which gathered 214 comments in 9 months, many of them talking about specific pain points in the new editor.

One of the single most frustrating things about communicating with Atlassian is being constantly asked to discuss pain points and cite specific examples and describe use cases of why I don't like a certain product or feature when I, and many others, have spilled it all over the past two years. Must we start from scratch and go through everything all over again every time someone new rolls onto this project? Isn't there some research you can do yourself to find these answers, or someone on the project to catch you up on the basic talking points?

"For now we are...not killing the old editor." I get it. I'm sure having two editors stinks for you all, and it stinks for me, too. Confuses my users, and causes a tremendous amount of rework and constant teaching for me. Like many other folks here, I'd be happy with one editor, as long as it had feature parity with what we had before.

[Maurice Pasman]

@dwinkler Amen. If only I could like this 1000x.

[Avni Barman]

@Maurice Pasman I understand your point. Unfortunately, you will not be able to create new pages in the old editor. However, if a template was originally created in the old editor, you will still have access to it and be able to create content with it.

@dwinkler Thank you for bringing that up! I will make sure to go through the thread and reach out to the appropriate teams within Confluence to get those pain points prioritized on our roadmap. We understand having two editors is not the most ideal experience and our teams are actively working to reach feature parity with the new editor as fast as possible! Thank you for understanding!

[Maurice Pasman]

@Avni Barman so you are killing off the old editor. This puts me in an awkward position, as I need the ability to create new pages using the old editor.

I sell a commercial product that is based on Confluence, I cannot have parts of the content look different from the rest (newly created pages vs existing content).

[Avni Barman]

@Maurice Pasman We plan to keep the old editor around for a while for those that still want to use it. We definitely understand the need for a single, consistent page experience. We’re investing heavily in the new editor to make it the best way for our users to express themselves. We have a bunch of exciting features coming to the editor soon, like image captions and image linking. Long-term it will be the only editing experience in Confluence Cloud. If you're interested in scheduling a call to discuss this further, please don't hesitate to reach out to me at abarman@atlassian.com. Thanks again for the feedback!

[Abdelhalim ELKHATTABI]

Hello,

Good news and improvements as usual! 

But in Confluence we have already the concept of “category” , related to each space ! And generating the same concept for a different function/use case will generate doubts of understanding!

it will be better if you change one of the concept’s name , and if it’s possible please to insert image in a globally template (example : company’s logo) when we create a new page from a “category template”. !

Kind regards 😇

Abdel

[Jen]

Maurice Pasman Aug 27, 2020 - It's good to keep some templates in the old editor to use - this way we still have options for the features that have yet to be published on the new editor.  ie HTML code box to disable page comments, amongst others.

[Maurice Pasman]

@Jen Great suggestion, if it weren't for:

1. Soon, new pages will not be created using the current modal, so I doubt we can still use old templates as a way to force the old editor to be used

2. It has been long impossible to create new templates for the old editor. So people should have done this months (years?) ago.

Which reminds me. It has been almost two years since Atlassian started to shove this dreadful new editing experience down our throats, and still there are issues blocking me and my clients from adopting it.