The new editing experience: we're listening

[#1]

Hi team,

It’s no secret that over the past few months as we’ve been gradually rolling out the new editing experience that there’s been a lot of feedback around the lack of flexibility and control when it comes to the layout of your content -- specifically around fixed width and columns.

We’ve been actively listening to all the great feedback while looking into this in depth and are now ready to share, openly and early in the spirit of Open company no bulls**t, an important update on our plans moving forward.

In the upcoming weeks we’ll be gradually adding the following capabilities to the new editing experience:

Full width mode

By default, pages will still start with a fixed width, but if you require more real estate to lay your page out differently, you’ll be able to go into “full width mode” which will allow you to use the full width of the page.

Additional column types

Today you can use 2 and 3 symmetrical columns. We're going to add in two more column options; both two columns, with the option of a left or right sidebar.

Making columns easier to find and more familiar

We also plan on moving Columns to the main toolbar so you can find them more easily, and are changing their name back to “Layouts” for familiarity.

Thank you again for all of the feedback — please, keep it coming! We’re doing our very best to listen, as we care deeply about this experience. We’d love to get your feedback and early thoughts on these upcoming changes.

Regards,

Avinoam

[Richard Franke]

I absolutely need full width for my technical content. Glad to have it on the road to return.

[Thomas Øhrbom]

This is great news, @Avinoam! Looking forward to this.

[Maurice Pasman]

Thanks for listening to us @Avinoam :-).

One question though, what would be the default when converting content created with the old editor? I am, of course, again referring to my 30+ customers, each having 500+ pages of content, that would look bad after conversion.

Will old content automatically converted to full width, or is this at least an option?

[Peter Davis]

Thank you. Is there a specific due date for these updates? :)

[Chris Jarvis]

Thank you!

[marco.scholl]

I think your act irresponsibly. It is a good idea to enhance the editor, but you switch to new editor without a possibility of decision. now we have a mixin of differrent pages and layouts. old pages use old editor. new pages ever use new editor. the new one has much less features. the layout around the content look totally broken. and you don't provide an upgrade path for existing pages.

that's so unprofessional...

[Cameron LaBorde-Zank]

You broke images again.

[Mark Wilson]

Happy you came to this conclusion, changes to enable full width and support the old column types are desperately needed.  The sooner you guys can roll these out, the better.  I'm avoiding touching any existing content until you do because I don't want to destroy the layout.  

[Brandon Burkett]

I have been digging through confluence settings for over an hour trying to figure how to get back to the old editor :(

It is frustrating because in company X, confluence is full width, but in company Y, it is centered and I was trying to figure out which setting was different.  Centering is NOT ideal for things like project plans and product requirements that require a lot of content, road maps, etc.

Is it possible for create a template based page (product / project) using the old editor right now?

[Arthur Mack]

Best news I have had in a long time, finally Atlassian are listening and we can get full width and our old columns back.

Thanks for finally listening.

Art

[christoph.chilian]

Please give users a choice with such comprehensive feature updates. The current procedure causes additional work for me and is absolutely unsatisfactory. There are no migration possibilities and from my point of view there are only disadvantages with the new editor.

[Ben King]

I just signed up to a new Confluence trial and I only see the old editor?

[David King]

I arrived here after searching how to get my first page created with the new editor to be full width. I finally ran across this post, which indicates that's a future enhancement, so in the meantime, I deleted the page and will start over.

Full width as a default is definitely our requirement, too. Not to beat a dead horse, but the motivation of having content render well across devices is laudable, but should not result in content looking awful on larger viewports. Our users are going to be using a desktop browser most of the time; reading content on a phone is somewhat of an edge case in our company.

So it's good to hear that you are putting full width back in, and I second that it should be the default mode, rather than starting with fixed width as you plan. If I interpret your plans correctly, all of our users will be forced to take an additional step when creating content, which seems like it penalizes users that prefer full width. Which leads me to a more general point...

You also should have these settings be something an admin can configure and enforce for an account. One of my gripes with Atlassian Cloud is that large changes, such as the new notification scheme in JIRA (which has been a significant source of annoyance for our users!), get rolled out, yet there is no way for an administrator to configure these settings for their users. I understand the challenges of customization in a multi-tenant environment, but Atlassian ought to be devoting R&D resources to administration capabilities, not just features. </rant>

Thanks again for the updates.

[Henry Snijders]

In full width I expect to see more columns..not the same 2 columns wth more space in them.. this new features make the product unuseable for me and my customers.. 

[Rafael Corredor]

Good news!

[Bob Allan]

Please include the Meeting Notes template in the list of pages to acquire full-width default mode.  Absolutely critical to have wide, left-justified in that template.  Thanks, Bob.

[Avinoam]

Just following up and updating that "columns" are now directly in the main toolbar of the editor:

More to come!

[Avinoam]

Another quick update - the "/" command is now more informative and visual also highlighting keyboard shortcuts:

[Mark Wilson]

Any update on when the “full width mode”  and additional column types will be available?  The last few weeks have been a struggle.  

[Ye Thura Thet]

My apology if mine is off topic. I have one request/comment.

1. To keep consistent editor for Global Template Editor and New Page Editor during this transaction period.

In our cloud instance, global template editor is using old page editor and new page(without template) is using a new page editor. 

The new and old experiences have considerable differences both in terms of functionalities and user experience. 

E.g. Status macro, Info panel macro, full-width mode, etc.

It is very painful to swing between old and new UI.

Thanks.

[Sharon Helms]

@Avinoam I'm interested in turning on the new editor for one of our sites, is that something I can/should request through support? thank you!

[Cameron LaBorde-Zank]

When are these fixes? Almost every day I use confluence I open at least one new support ticket. And its not getting in to the weeds, it's just doing normal things for a whole 20 minutes. Its been 42 days since this post went up, that's roughly 3 sprints, I think if you want to be transparent we need dates. If you cant provide dates we need to understand the scope of the teams working on this, we need some context to have any sense of confidence in using these tools. I suspect we will pass the year mark before we reach even close to full parity with the old editor and that seems like a bit much. And NO I do not want to have private conversations, I want this company to treat all of its users equally and provide real answers in public. 

[Avinoam]

Hey @Cameron LaBorde-Zank , thanks for the honest feedback. To provide some more context around this post - we shared this post on purpose at the point we made a decision, which indeed is very early, for the sake of transparency vs. waiting till we have it ready and waiting several more weeks to even communicate that we're looking at this which in turn could have felt like we're not even taking in the feedback. The potential downside of sharing early, as you pointed out, is it can feel like we're not working on it. I can assure you that the opposite is true as it's the first priority of features to introduce. To be more transparent we're in phases of testing it internally and working out all the edge cases, however, I still can't provide an exact timeline. What I'll be sure to do is, once we have more confidence in a timeline, to communicate when this will be landing. 

[Nanthees Paskar]

Where can we track the progress of this task? Desperately need to be able to use full width. 

[jemm1]

Hi @Avinoam .  Please provide an update on when we will be able to use the old editor as an option when we create a new page.  We've been forced to use other wikis for content updates until this is resolved. I'll assume this can be done within a week? thanks