The new editing experience: we're listening

Avinoam
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
March 28, 2019

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

85 comments

Richard Franke March 28, 2019

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

Like # people like this
Mads July 1, 2019

Agreed, but it should be an option for administrators, to configure sitewide "full width by default".

Wasting 60% of screen real estate by default, for "reasons", is a really bad decision.

Like # people like this
Stuart August 9, 2019

@Avinoam Thank you for listening to your customers and giving full width back.

I'd like to add another vote to this request - please empower administrators (especially in organisations where people are rarely if ever going to use Confluence on mobile) to make FW the default.

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Erica McGeorge August 29, 2019

I agree! I can't actually understand the point of full width not being the default. We use tables all the time and the full page width is essential for decent legibility

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Andrew Bitok September 4, 2019

Awaiting this new experience!

Like Peng Zhang likes this
Joana Cardoso de Afonso November 12, 2019

Full width is great but more and more companies use confluence & Jira on their phones and interact/ access it anywhere so being able to have both option looks like the right approach for me. 

Christoph Kuhnke November 12, 2019

Hi Joana, thanks for this comment. To me this sounds strange but I can understand. 

I want to propose a different option, though: 

I think the author of a confluence page is the wrong place to decide about layout.

Like Robert Watkins likes this
Thomas Ohrbom March 28, 2019

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

Like Chris Jarvis likes this
Maurice Pasman March 28, 2019

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?

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Avinoam
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
March 29, 2019

@Maurice Pasman that's a fair, and great question. We have yet to finalize an approach on this to be fully transparent but are heavily leaning in the direction of over correcting and having pages migrate into full width to alleviate the amount of change associated with having a page transition from one editor to another. Would love to get your thoughts on how you'd expect this to work on your end for the smoothest experience?

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Maurice Pasman March 30, 2019

@Avinoam I have a few thoughts on this, but maybe the other followers could also chime in:

  • Converting existing content to full width by default seems perfect
  • I would prefer new pages to do this too (to avoid new pages to look differently), maybe this could be a space/template setting
  • There should be a possibility to convert all content at once (to avoid some pages to look differently at display time). Maybe this could be triggered by the space admin on the space settings
  • Existing templates should also be converted to full width

Of course, this all cannot be forced upon users until the most blocking bugs (related to macros and the formatting of tables) are fixed :-).

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Peter Davis March 29, 2019

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

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Cameron LaBorde-Zank March 29, 2019

this!

Avinoam
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
March 29, 2019

@Peter Davis and @Cameron LaBorde-Zank in keeping with full transparency there isn't a specific due date just yet. We wanted to share the decision early here vs. wait till we have all the answers, since this is such an important topic :)

We're actively working on the scheduling for these and I can assure that there will be ample communication on timing as we have it!

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Brendan Patterson
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March 29, 2019

These are great moves by Atlassian!

I have to say I truly wish Atlassian would consider giving vendors access to an EAP server so we don't continue to get blindsided and can both help customers and help Atlassian test.  

OR (I've been told this is unlikely) something else with the same goal.  Any ideas?

Thanks!

Brendan

Like matt.orr@dtn.com likes this
Chris Jarvis March 29, 2019

Thank you!

marco.scholl April 3, 2019

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...

Like # people like this
Mads July 1, 2019

It should be an option for administrators, to configure sitewide "full width by default".

Wasting 60% of screen real estate by default, for "reasons", is a really bad decision.

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Cameron LaBorde-Zank April 3, 2019

You broke images again.

Like # people like this
Mark Wilson April 5, 2019

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.  

Like # people like this
Brandon Burkett April 6, 2019

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?

Like # people like this
Mads July 1, 2019

What is centering good for, really?

Confluence is not a CMS or a blog. It is a collaboration tool. The decision to waste 60% of the screen real estate by default is ... stupid, really.

Like # people like this
Mark Brunwin October 9, 2019

I also posted a plea of this nature. WE NEED FULL WIDTH COLUMNS BY DEFAULT IN THE NEW EDITOR! 

We have access to the old and the new editor, but you cant switch pages between them. All the pages created in the new editor are stupidly centred, with lots of space either side. there is NO tool to expand them to full width. There is also no tool to move the sections around on the page - its GONE. Why oh why introduce such a retrograde step for such a fundamental tool like the Editor? It makes no sense whatsoever.

 

Here's an example page with the new editor: Curiously the Expand Macro does have an option to go full width, as do other macros - but not the layout menu option!

Screenshot 2019-10-09 at 09.42.21.png

Arthur Mack
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April 8, 2019

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

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christoph.chilian April 11, 2019

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.

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Avinoam
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
April 15, 2019

@christoph.chilian really sorry to hear you feel that way! I'd love to talk and learn more about your frustrations. You can book time with me directly here https://calendly.com/azelenko.

 

Thanks,

Avinoam

Charles August 12, 2019

TBH its already hard enough to get some tech folk to document. If Atlassian continues these ham handed updates, I will consider moving my company to different software.

I've been a HUGE fan of Atlassian for years too.

David Andrianavalontsalama August 12, 2019

A company I’m working for is just using on-premise Confluence instances to manage tech documentation. Folks could not handle the antiproductive new editor.

Ben King April 12, 2019

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

Avinoam
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
April 15, 2019

@Ben King I'll follow up with you via email to help you out.

David King April 12, 2019

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.

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Avinoam
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
April 15, 2019

Thanks for the detailed feedback @David King ! As mentioned in this post we are listening and I've shared this internally so we can continue the ongoing discussions around such feedback. Please keep it coming.

David King April 16, 2019

Thanks for the response and openness to feedback. I understand the difficulty of developing features for such a diverse user base. Good luck...I'm looking forward to the next version.

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Mads July 1, 2019

Agreed: It should be an option for administrators, to configure sitewide "full width by default".

Wasting 60% of screen real estate by default, for "reasons", is a really bad decision.

Patrick Nelson November 8, 2019

Full width by default: That's what I'm here for. I just got thrusted into this "new" interface and, while I'm glad that full width is back (again), I'm pretty frustrated with having to constantly click every single time I create a new page. That's just a little annoying;

What's worse is if other developers go in to create documentation, they have to do this too. Otherwise, we end up with this crazy looking mashup of two different layouts, and it's not only cluttered looking but it's a little jarring. Not to mention that new layout doesn't look good as it's not properly aligned with anything.

Kevan Dunsmore December 3, 2019

I am totally confused by the new editor. I see no benefit at all in the centered view. I can make the columns full width but don't seem to have any ability to just have a single column. That's all I want. A blank page. Single column. Let me format it myself. Let me change the templates to look like that by default. Infuriating.

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Mads December 4, 2019

Kevan: They added a 'per user" configuration option to make full-width the default.

image2019-12-3_9-21-48.png.jpeg

Like Kevan Dunsmore likes this
Kevan Dunsmore December 10, 2019

Thanks for the tip. I've checked the box and my edit experience is back to normal. Appreciate it!

I still don't understand the decision to make the default for the application the silly centered view. There should be an option to change the default site templates or the full-width option for the entire site. 

Christoph Kuhnke December 10, 2019

Also fine for me.

Still I think this should not be an option to the preferences of the author but to the preferences of the reader or their device. 

See grid layout, for example at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txZq7Laz7_4 ?

Henry Snijders April 16, 2019

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.. 

Like Joana Cardoso de Afonso likes this
Avinoam
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
April 16, 2019

@Henry Snijders confirming that regardless of full width we'll be adding right, left and two side bars layouts back to layouts.

Rafael Corredor April 16, 2019

Good news!

Like Avinoam likes this
Bob Allan April 16, 2019

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.

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Avinoam
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
April 16, 2019

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

 

2019-04-16_1631.png

 

More to come!

jemm1 May 2, 2019

I don't understand how a new editor interface is released without an option to choose the legacy editor instead. Clearly the new editor has many issues that could have been identified by a beta group prior to release. I can't find the option to select the legacy editor anywhere. How do I find the legacy editor? Thanks

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Avinoam
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
May 6, 2019

@jemm1 let me reach out to you directly and see if I can help out.

Avinoam
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
April 16, 2019

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

2019-04-16_1634.png

Like Casey Graves likes this
Cameron LaBorde-Zank April 16, 2019

Cool.

Quick update:

1. Scrolling this list totally pegs single core CPU usage and it feels super laggy, most likely because of issue 2. However, this seems to be a reoccurring issue across all of the new editor when it comes to displaying "large" (not actually that large) sets of data in the editor.

2. This list is for some reason pulling in JIRA Wallboard gadgets? All of those items insert an activity monitor widget.

Avinoam
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
April 16, 2019

@Cameron LaBorde-Zank thanks for that update! 

1. I've passed this on to the team to have a close look at.

2. This is a known top priority issue which we're actively working on to resolve shortly.

Cameron LaBorde-Zank April 17, 2019

@Avinoam great, i went ahead and opened support tickets for them. 

My bigger question is this was two seconds in this feature being released, why does this keep happening with every release?

Like Stefano likes this
Mark Wilson April 22, 2019

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

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Roy Tseng April 24, 2019

+1

Been a long time confluence user and recently signed up for cloud only to find out that I'm forced into using a fixed width. I use all kinds of tables and images embedded into my pages so full width is a must. I've wasted hours in the last few days just trying to deal with fitting my content into the new constraint. So unproductive.

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Avinoam
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
April 24, 2019

Fair question @Mark Wilson! I'll repost my comment from https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-65654 to here:

I can't share an exact date yet, but can say that we're actively working on it as a top priority. Once we come closer in the coming weeks to a date that we can communicate externally I'll be sure to update this ticket, others and community as well.

Like Arnaud Cuzzolin likes this
Stefano May 6, 2019

so... where is the no bulls**t??!

This is just same usual Atlassian.

 

Listen to your customers... outstanding tickets never cared for...

and now a cute blog mode for a professional wiki used by techies. We don't want the fixed width.

Tables are utterly unusable. Give back full width!!

 

Not the first rant on around here. Paying customer. Often unhappy. 

Only thing preventing us to move away is the huge effort to transfer the content..

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David Andrianavalontsalama May 7, 2019

Exactly. Huge effort to transfer. Not a good or clever way to keep customers, I guess.

Mads July 1, 2019

It should be an option for administrators, to configure sitewide "full width by default".

Wasting 60% of screen real estate by default, for "reasons", is a really bad decision.

And, "cute" is spot on. We do not need cute. We need for our productivity to remain. Default to centered or whatever it is called, is a seriously ill advised idea.

Like Huw Griffiths likes this
Ye Thura Thet April 25, 2019

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.

Like # people like this
Avinoam
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
April 25, 2019

Thanks for raising this @Ye Thura Thet ! I'll reach out to you via email shortly to help out!

Nicky Sandhu April 29, 2019

I have a similar issue. We have intranet using Confluence Server 6.x with old editor and cloud migration public sites with new editor. We cannot be retraining everyone for two different editors and especially for content that has to be migrated from intra to external 

PLEASE keep the old editor for those of us who have thousands of pages of original Confluence content.

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Sharon Helms
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May 1, 2019

@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!

Like MARK RYAN DAYANGHIRANG likes this
Avinoam
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
May 1, 2019

@Sharon Helms , yes that would be best in general, but I'm happy to help you out directly :)

I'll follow up in an email shortly!

Like Sharon Helms likes this
Cameron LaBorde-Zank May 8, 2019

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. 

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Maurice Pasman May 11, 2019

"Open company, no bullsh*t"

Avinoam
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
May 9, 2019

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. 

Like Annika likes this
Cameron LaBorde-Zank May 10, 2019

@Avinoam Thanks for the reply. However, this doesn't actually address the problem which is that this is a live product and we're all stuck in the middle of a very messy beta that is being sold as a "release." There still isn't a way forward presented to anyone, there isn't a best practice because everyone is stuck in a variety of different states. I have people asking me why all of our pages look totally different, why half of our blueprints either dont work, or some of them are stuck on the old editor and some on the new one. Half the pages made need to be manually converted and all of the links re-made. There is a lot of people who are stuck, paying customers, who are asking you what to do and how to do it and for 7 months (for us some much longer) the answer has either been ignoring it or a vague promise of "some time later." Well that's all good and well but we're paying for a service that is broken and not having a timeline after months and months of work is frustrating to say the least.

I know none of this helps you get your job done any faster or easier, but we're struggling and frustrated. Pulling off these cavalier deployments and releases and then basically saying "trust us it will get fixed" but still putting all the work on your customers shoulders is insulting. 

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Stefano May 10, 2019

we are all in this boat. Extremely frustrating...

Like Maurice Pasman likes this
jemm1 May 10, 2019

Please provide an estimate of the time to add a button on page edit and site preferences to select an option for the old or new editor format for the page or site. We need to know that now to continue using Confluence. For us, Confluence is broken in production. This is not a feature request.

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David Andrianavalontsalama May 11, 2019

Well, for my part the old editor was working just fine, and I was paying for it. I personally don‘t see any meaning in paying for the new editor, full of wrong UX choices as I see it. I am deeply annoyed that this “editor” becomes the only available editor in Confluence, because it’s not at all the product I chose when I subscribed.

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Nicky Sandhu June 19, 2019

Frankly, this is an issue with "cloud" in general. You are at the mercy of the latest feature set like it or not. in my case, I was just starting to move in to the cloud and now my trust with Atlassian in managing this any better than Google is gone. I will be retreating back to my shell of premises installed version of which I can control upgrades and rollbacks. 

@Avinoam My suggestion is to think hard and fast in the future about such breaking changes. I can assure you that people at some point will feel enough pain to walk away from the product and your competitors are catching up. Good luck!

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Nanthees Paskar May 13, 2019

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

jemm1 May 13, 2019

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

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jim mason August 30, 2019

Hi @Avinoam 

The notes you list here are just notes.

Confluence has a product team behind the product.

That also means there is a clear product roadmap.

The company that makes JIRA could not avoid having a Confluence product roadmap.

That roadmap has epics, stories and more.

As an open company why not make that roadmap public like other open companies ( Hyperledger etc )???

The random notes provide little value on the long-term product roadmap and direction.

As customers of Confluence Cloud, we are all highly dependent on decisions your product team makes.

The closed door approach to sharing the product roadmap needs to end.

I suspect there are a variety of clear business reasons Confluence has behind the Web and Mobile versions but none of those are shared.

Statements like you'll love our editing experience is marketing, not honest communications.

A good product team would keep the old features as configuration options while rolling out new features.

Look forward to seeing the JIRA epics for Confluence ...

Like Nicole likes this
Charles September 19, 2019

Jim Mason -  Having a product team, does NOT equate to there being a clear roadmap with all software features. That isn't how Agile works. 

It simply means that someone might work on it.

Also - I'd like a full width page please. Still waiting people!

Like jim mason likes this
Peter Davis September 19, 2019

This is resolved in the cloud version I do believe. Pages now default to full width. I also so a blue widget pop up to allow resizing but can't seem to figure out how to see it again. 

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-65654?_ga=2.12281844.1547957231.1568730268-428095648.1555611510

Cameron LaBorde-Zank September 19, 2019

at least for us they don't default to full width but there is an option at the top of the page, the same one used for tables and columns, but also it doesn't actually take up the whole page. If you're on a 1440p screen there are 800 pixels of gutter. I'm not sure that is exactly what people were asking for here. The gutter on the old editor was 80px (or 40 on each side). 

jim mason September 19, 2019

@Charles  - I agree a product management team and product roadmap do not guarantee a good product.

I also don't think a need to improve a content management product to add more value for users going forward and run it in more environments has any relation to not supporting the existing content and features.  That's what user type profiles are for.

Yes Agile does not guarantee a good product. I've watched many Agile teams innovate and disrupt their leading products into the dust bin. Good product management requires a better, more transparent partnership with customers as priority one.

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