What's New in Confluence Cloud – November 2019 Edition

[#1]

Hey community!

This month we’re excited to share brand new features to help you make your mark on Confluence. If you haven’t already, check out our updates from October and September too!

Express yourself with improved comments
There’s a new comments experience rolling out to help you better express ideas, have meaningful conversations, and keep information flowing.

Here are highlights:

• Quick commands: Type “/“ to open a menu, add tables, mentions, and more. Type “:” to add emoji!

• Native macros: Take advantage of new native macro features including status, date, and code block.

Over the next few weeks, you’ll get the new page comments experience available to all Confluence Cloud customers.

Mix up your feedback style
Now it’s easier than ever to tell us about your Confluence Cloud iOS and Android app experience. Introducing Shake to Feedback! To report a bug or suggest an improvement, shake your phone like a Polaroid picture.

Here’s how to do it:

• Open Confluence Cloud mobile app on iOS or Android

• Go to Settings

• Enable Shake to Feedback

• Shake your phone the next time you have a problem in the app or a moment of inspiration. The app will automatically take a screenshot that you can message to the team.

Power feature tip
Link any Jira issue or project to a Confluence page by pasting a Jira link on a page or by typing /Jira to find a project or issue. With greater visibility across all stakeholders, your team can ship even faster.

That’s all for this time! Keep an eye out for next month’s fresh new features.

[Sven Schatter _Lively Apps_]

Nice!

...can we get the Emoji feature for the Community as well? :upside_down:

[Robert Brown]

Beware to everyone. Confluence has decided to not include undefined links in the new editor. Ask yourself, do you value wiki functionality. Did you purchase a wiki? Do you build page structure out ahead of time and click the red links to create pages? You can no longer do this in the new interface and confluence has determined this is a 'suggestion' and not a core feature. I agree, Atlassian, let our voices be heard! Bring back core wiki functionality.

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-67129

[McG]

The "Power Feature Tip" is actually pretty slick — I discovered it the other day, and it's a much-more-useful experience compared to using a Jira Issue Report macro.

[Monique vdB]

@Sven Schatter _Lively Apps_ 🙃

We're working on editor improvements on the community! But in the meantime, from the FAQ:

You can use keyboard shortcuts to add emoji to your posts. On Mac, use Command + Control + Space. On Windows 10: Win + period (.) or Win + semicolon (;) will work.

[Avinoam]

@Robert Brown thanks for bringing this one up. We're constantly evaluating our roadmap based on feedback as we go. We've actually decided to change the status of https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-67129?_ga=2.211456597.1395116515.1573500524-945426334.1525714588 in our public roadmap https://confluence.atlassian.com/confcloud/confluence-cloud-editor-roadmap-967314556.html from "no plans" to "short term backlog". While we can't yet commit to a date, we wanted to openly communicate these changes as we go.

Thanks,

Avinoam

[James Kinoshita]

Changing the formatting options by removing fixed width font for this stupid "code" thing is super annoying. Also Cloud Confluence often has problems going to edit mode. Several useful macros were removed.

I give this update a grade D.

[Mayank Raj]

Its great to see bump in UI appeal with breakage/confusion in embracing the change.

At the same time would like you guys to also give some tips to companies who have set things for failure. For example: The total number of valid states a task/jira issue can be possibly in is O(50) at my company.

It would be great to also guide your customers to setup JIRA/Set{applications} in ways that have been proven successful for companies.

[Michael Serebriakov]

Hi Atlassian,

I have a tiny request regarding UI in Jira, when opening an overlay window (e.g. creating story subtask) it would be great if we could use hide and show window functionality like the one we have in Gmail when composing a new mail or any other windows desktop behavior.

Thanks.

[colinb]

How can we get an RSS feed for the what's new posts? When I click the "Whats new" tag it doesn't seem to pull together any of the posts to be able to subscribe to.

[Loren]

I would love to see a simple "undo" function when you have made an mistake in documentation within confluence pages I .e. deleted or copied a table incorrectly, rather that have to go through the convoluted versioning process, once you have unpublished changes its very hard to simply undo your last action,  I find it hugely annoying !!!!!!

[ShengXing_Chi]

Is there any way to insert `date` into comment?

[Muneeb R_ Baig]

@ShengXing_Chi How do you want your date to get involved into comments? :)
For Calendar Dates, however you can use // to select the date.

[ShengXing_Chi]

@Muneeb R_ Baig Yes, I want to insert Calendar Date into the comment, when I type `//`, nothing happened.

[Tom Crowley]

I trust you're looking at fixing the emoji bugs in the actual editor as well as just introducing them into comments...

[Sundar]

Nice

[Vlad Radulescu]

These constant improvements are great and much appreciated.

W̶o̶u̶l̶d̶ ̶i̶t̶ ̶b̶e̶ ̶p̶o̶s̶s̶i̶b̶l̶e̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶a̶l̶s̶o̶ ̶g̶e̶t̶ ̶a̶ ̶c̶u̶s̶t̶o̶m̶ ̶e̶m̶o̶j̶i̶s̶ ̶f̶e̶a̶t̶u̶r̶e̶,̶ ̶p̶l̶z̶?̶ ̶:̶3̶ I now see that the custom emoji feature exists. My life is complete.

Thanks again!

[Henning Tegner]

Nice. I really like the new shortcuts to add tables, emojis, code etc. Anything that means I have to interact less with the mouse is welcome and means the tools work more efficiently for me. Keep up the good work.

[Shweta Chauhan]

Awesome!!

[Kelvin Hill]

You folks who offer feedback like "Great, Amazing, Wonderful, and Best Ever" clearly aren't using the new editor.

Tom, however, is spot on. Atlassian should focus on fixing the bugs already in the editor before introducing new ones.

How about the many image-related bugs in the main editor and now the comments box? Why is there no indication that these errors are being addressed? Why keep introducing new functionality when existing bugs are left unresolved?

Adding images in the main editor is a mess.

Adding images in the comments box isn't much better. I'll be happy to provide plenty of examples, but I get the impression no one cares. Am I making it up? Try this for starters. The comments box only offers centre alignment for images. Want a different alignment? Copy a left-aligned image from the main contents of the page and paste into the comments box, but DON'T expect the resulting image to be the same size.

[Rory_Apperson]

How about how they severely crippled your ability to insert links to other pages?  You can now only easily insert links for pages you "recently visited" which for me is a small, small percentage.  What used to be easily accomplished by hitting Ctrl + k and searching by label, title, or content in a convenient interface is now only possible by opening a new tab, going to the main search area, locating the page, copying the link, going back to the other tab, pasting the link, and setting it's link text.  Oh, and there's a bug when the link gets created where it doesn't take your link text, it chooses its own.  You have to edit it again to make it uses your preferred link text.

Oh and if you want to easily create that link again next time?  Copying the link as I described above is not good enough!  Make sure to actually browse to that page so it will show up in your "recently visited" list.  Please don't expect that to be ready in the list, though, if you go back to the tab where you were editing!  No, you have to close all your browser windows and open a new one and go back into Confluence before you can do that, silly!

Please vote for this issue!  https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-65363

[Kelvin Hill]

Thanks for pointing that out, Rory. Duly voted.

And what's the deal with the inconsistent way page links are displayed when inserting them? When you insert a link without hyperlinking it to some existing text, the inserted link has a note-style icon preceding the link. If, however, you hyperlink some existing text in the page, you don't get the note-style icon. What's that all about? The difference between the two styles of link isn't obvious, nor is it explained to the user when hovering over the link. It only serves to confuse.

[Rory_Apperson]

Did someone delete my comment??

[Rory_Apperson]

How about how they severely crippled your ability to insert links to other pages?  You can now only easily insert links for pages you "recently visited" which for me is a small, small percentage.  What used to be easily accomplished by hitting Ctrl + k and searching by label, title, or content in a convenient interface is now only possible by opening a new tab, going to the main search area, locating the page, copying the link, going back to the other tab, pasting the link, and setting it's link text.  Oh, and there's a bug when the link gets created where it doesn't take your link text, it chooses its own.  You have to edit it again to make it uses your preferred link text.

Oh and if you want to easily create that link again next time?  Copying the link as I described above is not good enough!  Make sure to actually browse to that page so it will show up in your "recently visited" list.  Please don't expect that to be ready in the list, though, if you go back to the tab where you were editing!  No, you have to close all your browser windows and open a new one and go back into Confluence before you can do that, silly!

Please vote for this issue!  https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-65363

[Tom Crowley]

It's not displaying for me either, @Rory_Apperson 

[Rory_Apperson]

How about how they severely crippled your ability to insert links to other pages? You can now only easily insert links for pages you "recently visited" which for me is a small, small percentage. What used to be easily accomplished by hitting Ctrl + k and searching by label, title, or content in a convenient interface is now only possible by opening a new tab, going to the main search area, locating the page, copying the link, going back to the other tab, pasting the link, and setting it's link text. Oh, and there's a bug when the link gets created where it doesn't take your link text, it chooses its own. You have to edit it again to make it uses your preferred link text.

Oh and if you want to easily create that link again next time? Copying the link as I described above is not good enough! Make sure to actually browse to that page so it will show up in your "recently visited" list. Please don't expect that to be ready in the list, though, if you go back to the tab where you were editing! No, you have to close all your browser windows and open a new one and go back into Confluence before you can do that, silly!

Please vote for this issue! https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-65363