Organizing your space just got easier - Page Tree Drag & Drop is here

[Elaine H.]

Hi Community! I’m Elaine, Confluence Product Manager. You may have read my earlier post about page tree in space navigation sidebar. I'm excited to share another improvement that helps you organize your Confluence content – you can now rearrange pages from your sidebar using drag-and-drop.

Here’s a sneak peek of the new drag & drop feature in action:

                   

This feature supports most common use cases of reordering pages in a space:

• Move a page to a different position under the same parent, to be under a new/different parent, or to another nesting level.

• Move a portion of the page tree (a page together with its descendants) all at once.

• The destination parent page, if collapsed, is automatically expanded when the moved page(s) hover over it.

• (Coming soon) Undo a drag & drop action.

A few important things to note:

• The Reorder Pages feature in Space Settings will continue to work as is, as far as we’ve planned. This is also where you can reset the page sorting order to alphabetical.

• Using sidebar drag & drop changes the page tree hierarchy for all users of the space.

• The space-level and page-level permissions required for Reorder Pages in Space Settings also applies in sidebar page tree drag & drop.

• Given technical constraints and usability considerations, we plan to enable this feature on any customer site with all spaces containing no more than 500 pages (per space). We’ll continue to solidify this feature and explore other solutions to address the need for organizing spaces with the largest amount of content.

We have enabled this feature for 30% of our customers and will continue to bring it to ALL eligible sites (<500 pages in each of the site’s spaces) throughout December.

Questions? Feedback? Please post your thoughts here. We look forward to hearing from you. Thank you and happy holidays!

[Davin Studer]

Have you studied in depth how easy it is to accidentally move a page, or are there any mitigating controls to keep that from happening. I would suggest maybe paring the click and drag with a keyboard combination to keep people from accidentally moving pages.

[Elaine H.]

Great to hear from you, Davin. Here are some details about how we manage accidental drag currently:

When a user presses the mouse down on an element, we cannot determine if the user was clicking or dragging. Also, sometimes when a user clicks they can move the cursor slightly — a sloppy click. So we only start a drag once the user has moved beyond a certain distance with the mouse down (the drag threshold) — more than they would if they were just making a sloppy click. If the drag threshold is not exceeded then the user interaction behaves just like a regular click. If the drag threshold is exceeded then the interaction will be classified as a drag and the standard click behaviour will not occur.

In case accidental move happens, esc key can cancel the drag while dragging. We're also developing drag & drop undo so user can revert the move after dropping.

We'll continue to monitor feature usage and iterate on it if necessary. We'll keep you suggestion in mind.

This feature is powered by Atlassian's open source library react-beautiful-dnd. You can learn more about it in depth here.

[Davin Studer]

That's great. I think having an "undo" would be a good mitigating control.

[carolyn french]

Good call out @Davin Studerand interesting to hear the technical details, @Elaine H.. After seeing this at Ship-It and the overwhelming response, I was hoping it would come to a Confluence near me soon...

[Bill Rudy]

Look forward to a Server implementation!

[Janakiraman S]

will this be available for Confluence Server too? 

[Elaine H.]

@Janakiraman S, I checked with my colleague working on Confluence Server and here's the status:

We don’t have sidebar page tree drag & drop functionality in conf server right now. It currently isn’t on the short-term roadmap.

To reorder pages in Conf Server, this is currently what you can do:

https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/move-and-reorder-pages-146407727.html#MoveandReorderPages-moving

[Sid]

This is long waiting feature we are looking for, We would like to have this in datacenter at-least for next enterprise release

[Soňa Duchovičová]

Hello, I really would like to have option - allow/disallow this drag and drop reorganization. This is big step back for us, because If somebody moves page by accident - he probably doesn't notice that and so he wont be able to undo this. Please, let admin decide if he allows/not allows users to have this feature.

Or add reminder- something like "Are you sure, that you want to move this page to new tree".

Thank you

[Rob Edmiston]

I am in support of this. We are constantly having to restore the page tree structure. 

[wang_p]

I wish I could disable this. When users browse pages there is always a chance of moving pages without noticing it. Even it is a small chance, we couldn't accept it because there would be nobody fixing the mistake. 

Also, this feature is not required everyday. I don't mind going to space settings to organize pages when it is needed. 

[Tom Crowley]

Did the 'undo' feature make it to live yet? And is there any advance on preventative measures? Warnings, permissions, pairing with a key, etc?

[Rainee Rohrbacher]

This feature seems to be enabled even when a user does not have editing rights to the space that the page is being moved on. Is this correct? Is there a way to turn this off? 

We are having major difficulties with things "mysteriously" moving around at the moment. 

[WEAVE PSO]

Can this feature be disabled? And if yes how? 

We are also having a lot of troubles with this and our page tree hierarchy is becoming a mess. The feature seems to be super-sensitive to any click and immediately activates.

I also tried to use the esc key to can cancel the drag while dragging, but it does not work!

Many thanks in advance for you help.

[Timothy Meunier]

This has been a constant annoyance.  Make it a permission and a switch you have to click first so it can't be accidental.

[Cor Elend]

So three years later @Elaine H.   we still have no workaround, not even a single shred of help from you guys to inject some JS to disable this behaviour.

Please be aware that with fine grained restrictions, people may just accidentally move stuff into public areas, leading to breaches.

I know you dont want to invest in server anymore, but can you do me a favor and just give some instruction to add custom script the head of "custom HTML" that actually works, allowing to disable this feature ? 

Thank you so much,

[Thomas Malmberg]

This is singlehandedly the worst feature ever implemented. Someone found a library of functionality and decided on using it. Pages are being thrown around, no way to know where and what and by whom. It is a mess, a complete mess. For what? For functionality that was more convenient and more structured to do in "view in hierarchy". Anyone knows if there is a script we can block using Adblocker to get rid of this horrible sh*t?

[alexander.eller]

I am experimenting with the following code in "Custom HTML - End of Heading" (idea: disable drag/drop for pagetree elements for non-admins):

Be aware, we are using are using RefinedThemes so rw_page_tree_container may be special ... oh, and yes - using Confluence server on premise ...

<script>
  AJS.toInit(function(){
    if (!(AJS.Meta.get('is-confluence-admin'))) {
      AJS(".rw_page_tree_container .draggable, .droppable, ui-draggable, ui-draggable-handle").removeClass("draggable droppable ui-draggable ui-draggable-handle");
    }
  });
</script>

[Sam Eben]

I've accidently moved pages into the wrong parent page. is it possible to track the movement of the pages so that i can move them back to the right place? this happened to many pages and ca't recall exactly which ones.