Try out the new editing experience

[StuartS]

Not sure i have seen a post about my issue yet, but i cant seem to create any content as the editor is always greyed out apart from "close" and text colour changes. Same issue on chrome, FF, IE/Edge. So far Cloud version is unusable!

[Cameron LaBorde-Zank]

That's the way the UI looks when your cursor is in the title. If your selecting in the body portion and it's still not working got nothing for you there.

[Avinoam]

@StuartS just in case you're running into a bug I've taken the liberty of opening a support request for you and you should be hearing from support shortly.

[StuartS]

Thanks. Out of interest it was randomly working the previous day, but now its not allowing any edit/create functions at all.

[Charisma Riley]

nt

[Huw Griffiths]

As a user at work of both the old Confluence Cloud and Server versions at organisations that I currently consult to, I was unaware when i just signed up for a new account for my own business that I would have to endure this new editor which, like so many others have described above has removed some basic simple controls which are fundamental to laying out content in a way which is fit for use in a corporate environment on monitors.

I want full page content as 95% of my users will be using a monitor not a mobile device! I use tables a lot, so not being able to control their width on the page is a major backwards step. If I "go wide" there is no way to left align content such as the page title, which looks very poor. How is this an improvement???  I agree with the comments above that until a lot of these issues are fixed, we should have access to the old editor. If not I will look for other alternatives. 

I like others have been a champion for adopting confluence in a corporate environment (over 100 users now using spaces that I have set up) so this new version is very disappointing.  I will no longer be recommending Confluence Cloud to my clients or network until this muppetry is reversed or rectified. 

[Raphael TANT]

Can not agree more ...

[Bruce Michelsen]

Add attachment from another Confluence page

We use a page to contain shared images that we reference in multiple pages. We can easily update the image in all referenced pages by updating the image in the Image "library" page.

Removing this ability to have multiple images on a page and reference each one in different pages is going to make maintaining images very painful.

In this situation of attaching multiple images that are referenced in other pages, the excerpt/excerpt include macros is NOT a solution because there can only be one excerpt macro in a page.

[Helen Gosper]

The excerpt option is definitely not a solution to this.

[Tom Crowley]

The reasons they give to justify removing this option are laughable, too.

[Tom Crowley]

Add attachment from another Confluence page

This feature would let you add an attachment to one Confluence page and then display it on multiple other pages. This would cause a number of dependency issues, such as where someone would unknowingly delete the image from the first page, and it would leave an error on all the other pages. In order to prevent this from happening, we've removed this functionality.

If this functionality was important to you, you can achieve the same thing by using the excerpt and excerpt include macros. The excerpt macro lets you put some Confluence content into an excerpt, which you can then use the excerpt include macro to display on a number of other pages.

Any changes you make to the excerpt will flow through to all the pages that the excerpt include is used on.

[Helen Gosper]

The whole point of the use case I outline below is that a content manager can take advantage of the dependency. No-one could accidentally delete the image from the first page because only authorised editors have access to edit the image library pages and delete attachments.

The excerpt etc tools are great for their purpose but almost useless for this use case.

[Tom Crowley]

It's a nonsensical reason. I'm not sure they thought some of these things through at all.

[Helen Gosper]

I'd love to see a reply from the Atlassian team on this topic please. The 'image library' use case is a valid and pressing one, particularly since there is still promotion of Confluence for technical documentation. We, the users, are making assumptions about why this has been removed and whether or not it will be reinstated. 

There are probably some of us who need to start looking at what other cms have to offer in this regard, but without knowing more about what's happening with this in Confluence it's hard to even do that.

Looking forward to seeing an official Atlassian reply soon. Thanks in advance.

[Raphael TANT]

only one month without reply ... really hate that monopolistic situation where this company is just doing what they want becasue there is no serious competitor ... yet ...

[Helen Gosper]

Hi I actually asked this as a question in the community and was advised to give input here.

I use Confluence cloud, having moved from server recently. 

My method of inserting images into a page has always been to house them in an image library and insert them onto the desired page using Insert > File and 'Search on other pages.' 

Even when using other CMS it's common (almost mandatory) to use images and snippets libraries and not have images attached to individual pages all over the place. 

Is there a way around this that perhaps I have missed?

[Helen Gosper]

Just an update on this. 

The following technique may help some people who are managing technical documentation. I wouldn't call this a 'workaround', but a way of achieving the desired result (at least for now, unless this falls victim to a change):

• Rather than create a new page, copy an 'old' one - as in a page you created before the 'new editing experience' was released (or in my case, before moving from server to cloud).
• Strip out the content and use the page as usual. The 'old' functionality is retained, i.e., you can embed from an image library. In fact, all the 'old' functionality seems to be retained.
• You can keep a copy of an old page handy for such an occasion (a bit like a pseudo template). 

It's not as painful as it sounds. Im my use case, being able to use this functionality in this way will still save me content management/maintenance time in the long run.

Just for the record, I do NOT recommend doing with internal collaboration pages (I'm not crazy!), just for a public technical doco space where you need an image library management system.

Interested to know if anyone else is doing this?

[Avinoam]

Hi all,

I'm happy to update that Full Width mode is now available as a toggle for all pages in the new editor. You'll find it to the right of the breadcrumbs when you're in the editor just above the page title.

Thanks,

Avinoam

[Casey Graves]

Thank you!  Took a while but I'm glad it's finally available.  The extra screen real estate is much appreciated and lets me build pages like I used to on the old editor but with the advantages of the new one.

[Julius Sudds]

It appears that pages created with the new editing experience are not visible to anonymous/public viewers. In the same space I created one page with the new editing experience and one page with the old/classic way with the exact same content.  The content on the old page is visible to public/anonymous users and the content on the new page is not. Is this by design or a bug?

[Tom Crowley]

Is there a way to disable the old editor? As bad as the new one is, I'd sooner only have a single one to deal with, particularly as we're currently importing content into Confluence.

it seems to be hit and miss which template we get. Currently bringing articles in through an API creates them in the old editor.

[Avinoam]

@Tom Crowley yes. If you contact support here https://support.atlassian.com/contact/#/ they can help you opt in.

[Raphael TANT]

what about opt-out ?

[Tom Crowley]

Also, how soon will it be before we can start doing basic things like adding borders to images and including admonitions (notes, warnings, etc.) in ordered lists? Because this is just really annoying.

[Avinoam]

adding panels (notes warning etc) to lists is in the works!

[Tom_]

Hi, I quite like the new editing experience but have just found that tables creating with this method are not sortable once done. Is this going to change in a future release? 

[Avinoam]

@Tom_ sortable tables are coming shortly!

Please follow this page to track: https://confluence.atlassian.com/confcloud/confluence-cloud-editor-roadmap-967314556.html

[Tom Crowley]

Why does the page tree macro not have a no-print option? Why has the div macro been removed? How do I hide things from the PDF export?

[Avinoam]

@Tom Crowley I hope this link helps answer some of your questions! https://confluence.atlassian.com/confcloud/confluence-editing-improvements-945107733.html

Also this: https://confluence.atlassian.com/confcloud/confluence-cloud-editor-roadmap-967314556.html

[Tom Crowley]

Nope, neither of those pages had any information about the div macro, no-printing the page tree macro, or hiding things from export. You might have meant to refer me to this page: https://confluence.atlassian.com/confcloud/we-re-cleaning-up-the-macro-browser-946028471.html because it alludes to the div macro as "hav[ing] the potential to break pages."

(That page also says that you "want" to remove those macros, even though you acknowledge that people use them. However the macro has already been removed, which shows how much consideration you actually gave to user feedback...)

So I'm still stuck with things being included in PDF exports that shouldn't be there (page tree search boxes are really helpful in a printed document!).

[Freek D'Hooge]

@Avinoam 

In the new editor the code macro has much fewer options compared to the old editor.
Things like themes, toggling line numbers and collapsing the window are all missing in the new editor. Certainly not being able to collapse the window is a major issue for us as we often place spooling output and such in the page, which can make it difficult to keep an overview of the page when reading, if it is not collapsed)
Also the syntax highlighting doesn't seem to work correctly.

What would be the best place to raise this issues with development and follow up on these?

[Avinoam]

@Freek D_Hooge thanks for the feedback!

Generally the best places to raise issues are:

• Community.
• Support - they can raise public bugs or suggestions for you here for tracking and upvoting.

[Diego Fernandez]

The new editor is the new default, and the old has deprecation a warning.

Atlassian please be more clear about the release dates and feature parity. The new editor experience is not there yet.

I don't see in the roadmap any plans to improve the image handling experience. Today there no way to:

1. Link external images

2. Resize images freely

The first one is important for specs. Is very convenient to work with diagrams and mocks hosted in external systems.

The second one is also important for specs or documentation with screenshoots. The new UI to resize images is extremely limited.

The lack of mention in the roadmap and the deprecation message worries me, since I've started to document UX specifications in Confluence, my alternative is to use Notion (which I'm evaluating right now).

[Tom Crowley]

Ohhhh... I've just realised why half of my images didn't get added when importing from Microsoft Word. Because you junked the inline images, any images that Confluence reads as inline during Word imports don't get brought across.

Instead of adding them on a new line or something, we just get a dead macro.

That's really, brilliantly helpful.

I definitely chose the right time to help engineer a move to Confluence. Now I know what digitally punching yourself in the nose must feel like.

[Helen Gosper]

@Tom Crowley where's the 'really like this comment' button?

[Tom Crowley]

Who decided that the Find and Replace feature should be removed? I hope that they "found" themselves "replaced" for that decision.

[fonda]

Every time I try to add a new section, it's added to the wrong part of the page, even when I get the cursor into the right spot! I thought it was really handy being able to quickly/easily move sections up or down in the old editing experience. Can't see that functionality in the new one - does that mean it got dropped?

[Bec Honey]

One major concern I have is: 

What is happening to our Existing *("Old editor") pages? 

So far, I have found that the Page Title of an existing old editor page, moves to the centre- and in edit mode I am not able to move it to the left.

(*in the new editor, there is an option to make the page full width which makes the tittle of the page go to the left). 

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-questions/Why-has-the-published-view-of-a-page-heading-moved-to-centre/qaq-p/1148227?utm_source=atlcomm#U1150294

In the new editor, the images cannot be resized and bordered etc... will that be fixed soon?

Can I get some more colours for fonts? - previously used a dark navy blue - doesn't exist in the new *(v. limited palette)  

When we need to update pages that were created in the old editor... what is going to happen when this version is actually gone? 

[Deleted user]

I have this issue as well.  MANY of my pages now have broken formatting and no way to fix them.  Can I bill Atlassian for the time it will take to manually re-edit hundreds of pages?

[Bec Honey]

Infuriating isn't it? thousands and thousands of lines of data which was created and formatted to help our users now looks amateur.

I'm furious. 

[Huw Griffiths]

Issue for me as well. and yes, results now look more amateur. 

Seems like when you crate a new page with the blank page (old) template (you know, the one that they left there for us migration Luddites who don't like the new editor and which they should have left well alone) you get the issue of center-justified titles and the ability to only go to 2/3rd's page width. 

However if you use the new blank page template the issue is not there...  an intentional nudge, or just more deployment muppetry during this dumbing-downgrade for Confluence? 

[Deleted user]

I've noticed this as well.  There is no good solution at this time (at least from Atlassian.)

[Tom Crowley]

As bad as the new editor is, because we're only just starting out on Confluence Cloud, I had everything migrated to the new editor because I don't trust them to successfully upgrade old pages to the new editor when they finally retire the old one. Given that they couldn't upgrade a page because it had a lot of info, note, and warning macros, I'd prefer to only have to fix the few bust pages I already have, instead of creating more work for myself later.

They don't seem to care in the slightest.

[Deleted user]

@Avinoam ZelenkoMany/most of my existing pages have broken titles and odd formatting changes retroactively.  The new editor is too limited (no indent for images? 4 colors? charts broken?) and we need to be able to use the old editor until existing problems are fixed and features that were removed replaced with adequate alternatives.  Is there a configuration we can use to remove "Blank Page" and use "Blank Page (old) (going away soon)" until we're confident the new format will work for us?

It's worth noting that this change from Atlassian has given me an enormous amount of work to do to fix changes that we didn't ask for.

[Bob Sovers]

Maybe this is Atlassian's way on ensuring that the usage rate will increase, if we all have to go re-edit all of our pages! 

[Di Chen]

"Extend page content to full-width"

This feature is great. I love it.

[Deleted user]

As a GameDesigner/3D Artist I use confluence mostly as reference database with lots of images, gifs and youtube videos. Old editor was perfect for this as I could stack images in a row, hide additional content behind {expand} macro and similar stuff.

But new editing experience cut out all handy features I've been using for nearly 8 years.

Can someone plz tell me when I'll be able to:

1. Paste youtube video so it could be watched from the page (Widget Connector Macro) as it was before?

2. Stack images in one line (current solution is to add Templates and put images inside them, But it's limited by 3 in a row and I cant use them inside "/expand")?
3. Edit images alignment inside "/expand"? Current behaviour is wierd as I cant change image alignment inside expand and have to:

• upload an image outside /expand
• apply "alignment"
• move image inside expand (but it won't count image as a part of expand content as you can see on the image below)

That's not straightforward and easy to manage so I have to use old editor in order to continue doing my job.

[Charles]

While I hesitate to apply the phrase 'don't mess with perfection' to the old editing experience in Confluence this update has 3 big negatives that do not make it seem like a step in the right direction  -

- Text editing tools were hidden/removed, are harder to find
- Formatting tools were hidden/removed, are harder to find
- I'm landed in an unfamiliar format and have to go find ways to get back to what I want to do. 

Please stop messing with my work. I'm no longer really a power user in this new environment. So on a personal/professional level the bar for walking away is getting a lot lower.

[Tom Crowley]

The Layouts feature doesn't work. Instead of columns it gives rows. This feature makes me even more happy about the removal of inline images. Instead of getting two images side by side I can now use the Layouts feature to, oh, get one on one line and the next one on the line below. Just like if I don't use the Layouts feature.

[Charisma Riley]

It's my favorite.

[Tom Crowley]

Interestingly, @Avinoam, I was recently contacted about a job vacancy for a company that uses Confluence. You'll never guess how I responded to that.

[George Smith]

Exporting to PDF still cuts out my text on the left. I hoped this would be resolved by now but it has not been and I know it has been reported multiple times.

[Charisma Riley]

I have honestly never used a documentation collaboration platform that has literally no consideration for the people who have to be in it, contributing and developing content all day, until now. Confluence Server on-prem is a decent product. What the heck happened with Cloud? Medium has more features, which is ridiculous.

[Huw Griffiths]

Yep - as a Medium user I know what you mean.

Whilst I wont convert my Confluence content to Medium, it does beg the question of what other alternatives are out there which do a similar job to the old cloud confluence editor if the new editor is forced upon us.  It used to be streets ahead of alternatives like MS OneNote, but now? I may have to do a "value proposition matrix" on the various functions that I use to decide which tool to use for my next project.  Other suggestions for alternatives? 

[Rohan Sherrard]

The new editor is rubbish, simple things no longer work like input JIRA Keys auto-linking. Works fine with old pages, not with the new editor.

I'm just hoping this doesn't end up the same as the "New Issue View" in JIRA.

A bad project that destroys more than it improves, is then forced on the user base and then pretty much left unfinished.