A more mindful way to publish is coming soon

[#1]

Hi Community,

Hope you're well this week! I'm dropping in to let you know of some exciting updates coming soon to the Confluence publishing experience.

What's changing?

Current publishing experience:

We heard your feedback that the Publish button causes resistance to putting content into Confluence until it feels final and ready to be shared. This is because the Publish button, in one click, can take you from half-baked thoughts on a page to wide broadcasting, and the options to adjust the page settings are not easily discoverable.

New publishing experience coming soon:

To achieve a more mindful way of publishing, we are adding a new Publish Dialog to publishing drafts for the first time and updating existing pages.

Publishing drafts

The Publish Dialog adds a step into the flow on initial publish of a page when it goes from Draft → Published. Within this dialog, you can choose where the page is located, who can access it, and whether to send notifications to watchers of that space. You can also open additional publishing options like scheduling content to be published at a certain date and time or publishing as a page or blog.

These options will be removed from the More actions menu (three dots icon), where they currently live. The More actions menu will keep all other non-publish-specific options.

Updating existing pages

In edit mode of existing pages, you’ll see the down carat ( ˅ ) next to the Update button to bring up the same dialog for adjusting settings.

How does this benefit me?

This change to the publishing experience is intended to:

• Enable you to publish with confidence knowing exactly who will (or will not) be able to access or collaborate on your page.

• Provide a greater sense of control over who views the content before it goes out.

• Simplify the publishing and permissions management process.

What do I need to do?

This feature will be rolling out gradually beginning mid-June. There’s no need to opt-in or sign up, so stay tuned on Community for another announcement once it becomes available soon!

If you’re an admin managing a Confluence site on the continuous release track, you’ll see the feature appear as soon as it becomes available to you. If your Confluence site operates on the bundled release track for new product features, you’ll receive these updates along the usual bundled track schedule and details in upcoming release notes. Learn more about managing product release tracks here.

[Dave Mathijs]

I do like the fact that you can disable notifications for your initial publish.

[Nikki Zavadska _Appfire_]

I didn't know I needed this until now - thank you!

[Amanda Barber]

This is a fantastic improvement! Thank you!

[Andy Gladstone]

@Cindy Ji thanks for this post! It's been a long time in the coming, and will be something that so many users will welcome. #FearlessCreation

[Hana Kučerová]

Great improvement! Thank you!

[Salomon]

This is great! I think this workflow will feel more intuitive to novice users and reduce friction in usage.

[Barbara Szczesniak]

This will help, certainly.

I have used my templates to create all the pages for my space as an outline, but I have found that I cannot add a link in the page I'm writing to another page unless I publish that other page. This bothers me, since that page currently only contains a title and the boilerplate content of my template.

Can I use this new dialog to publish those pages and give access only to myself (only writer)?

I like that on subsequent publishing, I'll be prompted so I won't forget to change this access (first for my reviewers, then for all when we're ready) and that I have a convenient place to add version comments on publishing.

[Cindy Ji]

Hi @Barbara SzczesniakI'm so glad this feature will be helpful to you! Yes, you'll be able to assign access to only yourself with the new publish dialog. In the meantime, you can also use the lock icon in the top right corner of a page to adjust viewership restrictions (Select the option: "Only specific people can view or edit", and it'll automatically set access permissions to only yourself until you add others.)

[Tomislav Tobijas _Koios_]

I already see some of my colleagues giving a toast to this as they won't be receiving emails on Friday afternoon due to the fact that I sometimes tend to publish a couple of pages and usually give them a heart attack 😅

[Dan.Tombs]

I do see a huge improvement with the restrictions functionality here. You often hear of users that "didn't know they could do this" or "I thought it did this automatically". So this should make some lives easier. Although, it does worry me a little as an admin that we are going to end up with some very ugly and messy spaces with huge rabbit holes.

The other stuff I think is so good. Disabling notifications etc is always going to make lives easier. Only time will tell.

[Ken Young]

A suggestion is to also include some tie in to the "Status" feature of the pages as well (or at least to allow you to edit it) for items that you want to mark as a draft.  It would also be good to be able to query the status as well via CQL.

[Matt Reiner _K15t_]

Thanks for sharing this @Cindy Ji, I've been excited about this feature for a LONG TIME now. 🙂

Also, we just had to make a short little sharable video about it: https://youtube.com/shorts/i81MSyLLsfw

[pjwalker]

@Lingyang Zhu  Is the Page Creator or Page Owner retained from the original space? Or does it change to the person publishing?