No Page Tree in new UI design?

Matthew Warren August 14, 2017

The Page Tree is our primary means of organizing and navigating content. How is it possible that such a foundational aspect of information organization and discovery is removed? 

My most common use case is using search to find content and then being able to browse related content organized by the author in the same section of the tree.

Please tell me this can be turned back on as a persistant lefthand UI.

4 comments

Stephen Deutsch
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August 14, 2017

As far as I can tell, the page tree did not go anywhere... are you sure you didn't collapse the sidebar? You can press the [ key to show/hide the sidebar.

Matthew Warren August 15, 2017

You are correct sir. 

For some reason it was not expanding when the switch happened. I've opted out and now back in and it shows up now. 

Pitchforks back in storage. 

Like Kranthi Kiran likes this
Michael Corvin August 17, 2017

My pitchforks are not yet stored.  

The "New Confluence Experience" page tree format is bad and shows perhaps half what it used to due to fonts and spacing that seem to be 'optimized' for small screens.  The clunky, space-wasting new icons are more of the same.

We also rely on users landing on pages with the page tree and a set of custom sidebar links displayed on every page on a site for consistency and ease of navigation.  If they want more page space it's up to the user to minimize the sidebar - not the other way around.

Indeed the whole new UI layout and behavior pretty much sucks.

See also: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-discussions/What-just-happened-to-Confluence-Cloud/td-p/622890

Martin Sauter August 18, 2017

@Michael CorvinI absolutely support your argument about the new space-wasting design. This looks nice on a 27 inch iMac, but it's a pain on a 13 inch notebook.

It would be no great effort to implement an option for users to choose their preferred line spacing, but it would make a big difference.

Jeremy Fischer August 18, 2017

We're in this same boat. We use a section of our Confluence space as a public wiki. What was easy to navigate is now almost impossible. 

How can we get the page tree style like we had in the sidebar? This is critical functionality for our wiki/user documentation...it's pretty much useless without it. 

Martin Sauter August 18, 2017

+1

Mike Jackson October 7, 2017

+1

Penny Redhead August 20, 2017

I'm not a fan of the new design and agree with comments above.

My pain-points:

- Can't hide blog (which I never use, and never intend to)

- I liked the page tree and flexibility of adding custom sidebar items (yes, I know I can do that sort of, but I can't easily change order or labels)

- I'm constantly changing the order of new pages and moving things around - now it takes at least 3x clicks to get to 'reorder pages'

 

I'm a bit confused as to why I was given a 'new' UI layout several months ago, it was subsequently reverted back, and now the new layout has returned. What's the go??? 

Guy Cardwell September 10, 2017

I'm in the same position as the rest of you folks.  I don't use blogs on my site, so I don't need that option in the sidebar.  But more imporantly, I have public facing documentation that relies on having a navigable page tree visible at the same time as the page content.  

On my site at least, it appears that you can no longer display a page tree in the left side bar, which means that you can't tell where you in the space, and can't navigate up and down the page hierarchy from a given page.  If I'm on a page in a manual I've composed in Confluence, the old UI showed me where I was in the page tree, so I could then select the next logical page to read.  Now, I can't do that, and I have to go to a separate page tree, figure out where I was, then navigate from there.  It's a much worse UX for this common case.  My alternative is to create page markup for all of my navigation, which isn't ideal by any means.   

I think Atlassian have removed one of the most useful features by getting rid of a navigable page tree on the left hand toolbar.

Oddly, the Confluence documentation says that you should be able to get a page tree:

"When you're in a space, click Pages in the sidebar to reveal the page tree (or the icon if the sidebar's collapsed). If you'd like to see the page tree when you're viewing a page, expand the sidebar and you can see them side by side."

What I get instead looks like this:

Capture.PNG

I've temporarily opted out for now, but unfortunately, I think this forces my hand on hosting my user manuals with Confluence.  Without a page tree, I can't imagine this working for me in the long run.

Matthew Warren September 10, 2017

Though I agree with you in general, the page tree does show up once you have hit a page below the top of a Space or below Pages. 

Seems crazy to change up the navigation pane behavior like that, but that's the way I see this new design working. 

Guy Cardwell September 10, 2017

I never navigated below the home page of the space, so I never saw the page tree appear in the side bar (or when I did, I didn't have the side bar open).  It's definitely non-obvious but possibly workable.  I'd need to put some kind of starting navigation into the home space, but that's probably not a bad idea anyway.

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