What's New in Confluence Cloud – July 2020 Edition

[#1]

Here’s another edition of “What’s New” this month in Confluence Cloud.

Quickly (and more easily) adjust permission settings

We know that sometimes the layers of space permissions and page restrictions can be confusing and a bit cumbersome to fix. So we’ve made a few improvements to help you find and fix those issues with a little less legwork.

1. The restrictions icon 🔒 is now next to the Publish button as an easy reminder to check permissions before sharing.

2. A new link to help you find a space admin who can help you fix access issues when you get an error during sharing.

3. A way to quickly request edit access for someone who may only be able to view.

4. Additional support to identify which parent page is preventing someone from viewing a page you’re sharing.

5. Users can have the ability to delete the pages that they create. Note that this is a feature that can be turned on or off by admins.

That’s a lot to cover in a roundup, so go here for more details and screenshots!

Enrich pages with contextual Smart Links

Hyperlinking is a thing of the past. Smart Links show you information beyond the display text, so you can get more context about the linked content without even clicking on it. You should have experienced Inline Smart Links by now, but currently rolling out is the ability to toggle to Card view.

Right now, the ability to display cards is available for links to Confluence, Jira, Bitbucket, Dropbox, Box, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, Asana, and Github. More will be coming in the future, as well as the ability to fully embed a link’s content into a page. To read more about Smart Links, check out this post.

Find & read inline comments easier

We love inline comments. But, in the past, it’s been a little frustrating to individually click on each highlighted section to read every comment, one at a time. Enter the new comment icon 💬, rolling out now! The button is located at the top right next to your other key buttons. Clicking on it guides you to each inline comment. Or, if there are no comments on the page, you’ll learn that too without scrolling and hunting them down yourself.

Link to undefined, placeholder pages

Do you know what future pages you want to build (and link to) but haven’t made them yet? Fear not! We’ve brought back the ability to link to (and create) undefined/placeholder pages with ease.

Just type [placeholder page name]() and instantly create an undefined link. It comes equipped with an “undefined” label, so people know before clicking through the page does not exist yet. We’ll add this functionality to the macro list soon but for now, you can use this bracket/parentheses shortcut.

Ready to create that page? Just click on the link (when published or in edit mode) and you’ll be transported to a new page with that title, ready to be filled. Read more here.

That’s a wrap for this month. Stay tuned for next month’s edition by following the tag “whats-new” on Community.

[Sachin]

This is very helpful @Brittany Sudlow , thank you for the post!

[Maurice Pasman]

Hyperlinking is a thing of the past.

Well that explains why it's still not possible to search all pages when creating a hyperlink (as it was possible in the old editor).

May I remind you Confluence once was a wiki (and many people still use it as such)?

Cloud is wandering so far off the track, I wonder when compatibility with Confluence Server will be broken.

[Liz D]

Smart Links are pretty neat, but it'd be great if we had an inline anchor macro.

[Bradley Duck]

The notification that brought me here said "You asked, we listened...", well we have been asking for a dark theme since 2016... please listen...

[Hans Bloemendaal]

I just thought "wow.... finally" but all the new features mentioned weren't the ones I've been asking for for quite a while yet.

So actually, I'm quite sad now.

When will you finally deliver the functionality to make a report of the "decisions" macro's used across my pages?

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-62245

Numerous examples have been given how this missing feature can make our work much easier. Come on and really listen to us. 

[Xavier Amador]

Is there a way to not use Smart Links? There are many times that I want to link to another page inline or as part of a sentence (e.g. 'For more information click here') without having the link appear as the article name in a different format. 

[Sheryar]

My Confluence and Jira is extremely slow and sometimes, it keeps loading. (internet speed is awesome, everything else works great)

[Krissy]

I've also found confluence to be extremely laggy recently, I've had to start writing in other documents and pasting into confluence. 

[Matt Roche]

Do the people at Confluence even believe in writing any more, or are you desperate to become a social network?

What we want are tables that are actually editable, tabbing that works, and easy keystroke linking so that we can write about the software we are creating.

And good lord, the idea of hyperlinking was to be able to link to an elaboration of a word or phrase without losing context.  So that most people could read efficiently, and those who needed more could go a level deeper. Pages are not "posts", they are documents.

You guys are using Slack too much and your product too little.

[Valbona Bushi]

Are some of these still rolling out? I don't see the comment icon for example yet

[Sachin]

@Valbona Bushi  I believe so, these changes are being gradually rolled out and may not be on your site just yet Atlassian Cloud changes Jun 29 to Jul 6, 2020 

[Tom Hudson]

I've seen the smart link feature for a while and sometimes I like it and sometimes I hate it.  I find myself on certain pages manually creating hyperlinks because I want just a text link named exactly as I want it.  But then if the name of the target page ever changes, though, I'm pretty sure the link breaks.

[Slavi]

Thank you for the post.

It is very good that you are trying to invent new features, but

what about a simple way to reply to specific message without copying the message you want to reply to like in some 20 year ago icq beta?

[Syed Kafilur Rahman]

This is very helpful!

[Felix Freeman]

Great news.. Very helpful.

Thank you.

[Brittany Sudlow]

@Xavier Amador If you want to hyperlink a word or phrase (instead of Smart Link), highlight the text and click the link icon at the top and insert the link there. That should be what you're looking for!

[Xavier Amador]

@Brittany Sudlow - This doesn't work in the new editor, which is exactly the problem. If I highlight a word, sentence, etc. and select the link icon, once I add the link, the word, sentence, etc. is replaced with the new Smart Link.

[Tom Hudson]

@Xavier Amador Unless you've received an update I don't have yet, manually creating links still works for me:

Here I've selected the text I typed, "Android 1.51.1 Release Page", and tapped the link tool icon in the ribbon at the top of the editor.  There are a bunch of options to select previously viewed pages to begin with, and I'm sure I can search by page name.  But I just paste in the URL to the page, as you can see here. It still recognizes that it's a Confluence page.

Then, I hit enter.  My text link is there, going to my confluence page, but it's not displayed as a smart link:

Does this work differently for you?  Or am I misunderstanding your problem?

[Valbona Bushi]

the added feature on inline comments is still not available on our site. How do I know when they will be?

[lanaburns]

Can we expect some more of the old confluence features to return?

[libin.louis]

This is good stuff! Also, I agree with @lanaburns