Try out the new editing experience

[Shane Dodd]

We got tired of dealing with it. Fortunately, we were still in testing/proof of concept stage, so canceling the account and pulling down our data wasn't a huge headache. Good luck to all of you! We hope that it gets better for you!

[Raphael TANT]

the new link inserting function is so better than the old one!,

No more option!, no more way to link to attachment

Obviously this is sarcastic ...

The more confluence is progressing the more it is looking like a private medium kind of management content ...

Can not wait for the competition to wake up ...

[Nathan Morris]

I can't believe I had to file this:

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-67565

A long term feature just broken....

[Nathan Morris]

Does anybody know if the untested New Editor (Fabric?) is also plaguing the Confluence Server or Data Center versions?

[Davin Studer]

No, it is Cloud only.

[Peter Kidson]

New Confluence editor.
Everything is now much less flexible and harder to use.
PLEASE add an option to turn if off.

[Conrad B]

Is there a way to NOT edit with "edit-v2"? It doesn't seem ready for prime time use.

It seems like only the new page creation forces the v2. But I don't want v2 at all. There are features not yet there that either are still pending or purposely ignored that make my wiki creation experience much easier.

Here are the 3 main things that are making it more difficult to use. If there are solutions I am unaware of, awesome. just let me know :) 

- Cannot move rows around

- Cannot go to 1 column format

- Select all within a form box now selects all on the entire page instead of just within that box.

Hoping someone has some good news to give me :)

[Alik]

No good news here. We are all in the same boat screaming SOS into the void. :)

[Michael Deck]

I haven't tested this in a bit but last I checked it was still working:

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-discussions/Try-out-the-new-editing-experience/td-p/1000813#M4090

[Conrad B]

Nice! This works.

Just a point to note is that it must be done at creation in order to still keep the old editing method. So the pages I have created in the new version would need to be created from scratch.

Glad to see there is a workaround. Thank you Michael! I really appreciate it.

[Raphael TANT]

Everyday use, everyday an issue with this new editor crap.

1/ all thedoc on confluence speak about the previous editor notthis one, all my users are lost ... nice job!

2/ inserting a link is not possible correctly, great, now when a user reference a file in Teams the link is 4 lines long (at 100% on a 1080p screen, on mobile I believeit is the full page probably)

What are the solution?

Roll back is it even possible ?

[Sequoia McDowell]

I enjoyed using the new slash shortcuts when they came out. Started showing them to a colleague but her editor didn't have them. Funny! Then I create a new page. Lo and behold, my editor doesn't have them anymore either.

Randomly enabling and disabling new features makes for a really confusing and frustrating experience for individual users. If you turn it on for me, my org, my segment, or whatever you turned it on for that gave me the feature, leave it on.

It's bad enough guessing what style I should use to make an H2 when I'm in confluence, jira comment, jira description etc., now even within confluence the markdown & macros are unpredictable. Bad show.

I like the new shortcuts & editor overall.

[Tom Crowley]

Remember how inline images had to be replaced by emoji? Potentially not a bad idea. A bit of a pain adding all the emoji, but once you've added them, it's easy enough to insert them into the page, right?

Right.

Right up until they somehow all get deleted and you can't access any of them anymore.

Grrrrrrrrrrr

[Tom Crowley]

@Avinoam Thoughts? 200 of my pages are now just full of :icon-pencil:

[Tom Crowley]

And I can't even add them back, because the Add New Emoji option has vanished.

[Tom Crowley]

Looks like it fixed itself... never mind.

[George Smith]

Guys, I read all of these comments. Please, use the old editing experience. When they roll out a new product or feature, you expect things to get better - easier, faster, and more visual appealing pages. Yes, the pages are slightly more visually appealing but they are pain to create and it takes a lot longer to do even get them close to where the old experience is.

Don't use this for a year and if things have improved by then, we can try it again. Until then BYE BYE New Editing Experience.

I am signing off from this thread.

[Deleted user]

Devs. It's been 3 painful weeks and I've finally fed up trying out your "new editing experience".
Most commonly used features are broken/missing.

I'm switching back to normal editor.

There are only 2 things i want to know:

- for how long you gonna support proper (old) editing experience?

- what happens with the old pages as soon as you'll finish your "new torture experience" and force users to use it?

[Michael Corvin]

My response: anger and loathing because it screws up usage for our team.

I just noticed some new pages created by users look like crap with the bizarre 'fixed width' silliness making the layouts all jumbled.

Page layouts using our established templates (eg customized meeting notes) are hosed up and look like crap.

You just made a bunch more work for me having to try and fix things and explain to users why their pages look weird.

Worse, the cloud 'experience' has now diverged totally from that on the server hosted sites we have for operational projects.  Our users now have to work in two, essentially totally different environments which causes confusion and frustration. 

[Bec Honey]

->  -> https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-discussions/Changes-to-Confluence-Editor-release/td-p/1031058/page/2

[Helen Gosper]

@Avinoam thanks for the comment. I really think the frustration with the new editor has been exacerbated by what seems to be a lack of response from Atlassian to a lot of very valid concerns. So people will appreciate this reply. Having said that, your team needs to get some firmer communication out to users ASAP. Hopefully you have understood that this noise is beyond a typical whinge about a new release.

The message your team needs to take from this isn't that users are struggling with change, or that we are reluctant to embrace change; rather, it is that we have lost basic functionality that we all used, all the time.

You also need to know that as a workaround for a variety of use cases many of us have resorted to copying old pages and striping out content in order to be able to use functionality such as: ability to set picture size and add effects, ability to use an image library for technical documentation, anchors, ability to use old templates (which we all spent ages developing in the first place to save our companies time), troubles with tables, I won't list them all. So - as for what will happen with old pages - I sincerely hope the answer is 'nothing'.

I look forward to seeing more communication from Atlassian on this soon.

[Nicole]

Well said!

[Joao Correia]

Does anyone know how to move the rows of the layout UP or DOWN? Seems the ability to do that is gone.

These simple things that look like nothing ... kill your productivity when they are gone.

[fonda]

I asked the same question a while ago, more to confirm if they actually dropped that functionality.. I didn't get a response. That actually made things easy to move around - now I'm trying to avoid using layouts but it's really not ideal, in addition to the other 100 things wrong.

[jim mason]

Agreed. The new editor misses the mark completely on table layouts. Maybe the product team will recognize that and use tinymce instead. That editor supports table layouts nicely and is open-source with an LGPL license.

[Raphael TANT]

Another day wit hthe new editor.

Anchor are not working anymore, how is it usefull fro the users to have to find the information inside the page ??

And of course the trick to fill up by ourself using title in the url do not work obviously ...

I grow tired of this so much!

 Is there any staff from atlassian reading this just a waste of time as usual ?

[David Yazel]

After reading through the comments it looks like we are stuck with the new editing experience.  Right now I can no longer create the content I like on confluence / cloud for all the reasons already mentioned.  Is this where we should report or vote on issues or is there a jira we can submit tickets to?

I make extensive use of templates with excerpts section and then later use include child pages with rich excerpts.  I can't make that look good anymore. A lot of the issues are with the inability to set the image width explicitly, the poor table editing capabilities and the inability to justify images inside of excerpts.  We no longer seem to have the ability to choose the old editing experience when creating a template.

[Michael Corvin]

Good grief - I hadn't checked that yet.  We also use Excerpt and Excerpt Include quite a lot, usually with tables in the Excerpts...

[Patrick Gregory]

In the new Confluence page editor, does anyone know how to stop getting the tables to horizontally scroll like an iframe that extends beyond the width of the table frame. Right now when I input a table, I cannot get every one to appear as fixed elements. They often load into the page with a horizontal scroll bar which hides some of the table cells. It's driving me nuts.

[jim mason]

The new table layout controls are a big problem to put it mildly.

So far the product team is not responding to help.

What SHOULD happen is they provide table layout controls similar to the OLD table editor with added settings for the table that allow you to select horizontal fixed or scrolling behavior.

Not sure why this continues to be an issue but it is.

[Patrick Gregory]

I've gone back to copying and pasting old templates, clearing the content and using the old editor to create the new content. This is a pretty hack workaround for such high profile, well established software. I get that they are struggling with this behemoth codebase but they really should not be rolling out new editors unless they are in beta. You can't force updates that completely remove core functionality (ie creating tables) and expect people to still be able to use the software.

[Shaun Sheehan]

It's a pain.  The best way to represent on this and get attention of the Atlassian team is to upvote and watch the Jira issues logged for all of the defects and loss of functionality.

Here are a few we've logged-please upvote if they impact your teams as well:

Inability to set image size in Confluence page

Inability to use images as links in Confluence (previously could)

Jira issue/Filter macro in a table adds a lot of white space (scrolling)

I know there was another ticket on the table scrolling issue, but I can't find it...

[jim mason]

Hopefully a future release won't break your ability to use old templates.

After a bad release of Confluence Cloud, I wasn't able to create pages from an old template with a good layout.  Confluence rolled back that release but when I removed the cached template it had been updated with the new bad editing tools.

[Helen Gosper]

@Shaun Sheehan - voted! 

[David Yazel]

I give up.  I worked for hours trying to get the "blog post" macro to work on my main page.  It loses all the formatting and puts every image on its own line.  Not to mention that even making the blog post look good is nearly impossible.  Why am I alpha testing this software for Atlassian?

I will be moving off of confluence as soon as I can migrate the content.

See ya.

[jim mason]

Good point and good luck on the migration.

[Michael Corvin]

Good luck.  With over a decade of 'knowledge capture' in Confluence and several operational missions using it (all those on the as-yet un-corrupted server version...) that's not in the cards for us.  But the divergence in user experience vs the on-premise version(s) caused by this alpha churn on the one cloud site we use is a big problem.

If I was implementing a completely new environment, I'd  seriously evaluate xwiki as an alternative, although it would take quite a bit of work and implementation to match some of the really useful features of Confluence + Plugins (eg, page properties, Comala workflows and the Scroll exporter).

BTW, this may be of use: https://extensions.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Extension/Confluence/XML/

[andrea.crouch]

Was the ability to comment on images on the new experience removed?

[Martin Boehme]

Embedding images from other pages is a must have.

Please bring back this feature for the new "insert image" dialogue

[Michael Corvin]

AGREE!   I hadn't checked that yet...

Good freakin' grief... aspects of the new editor UI are 'cleaner' but the loss of critical functionality is utterly inexcusable.

Deprecation of "[" and "{" for initiating links is going to be super annoying, requiring even more 'context switching' when moving between our server sites to cloud site.

The PDF, Word, Powerpoint, macros are BROKEN - at least, they sit spinning the busy ball for me for minutes so I gave up on them.   And, if like the image/file viewer they don't reference files on other pages, that makes this corrupted cloud version essentially UNUSABLE.

[Richard Kennedy]

Edit: Discovered the issue was with copying and pasting videos between old and new experience topics. I downloaded the video and dragged it into the editor without issue.

Hi,

Is it possible to put videos in the New Editing Experience topics?

Thanks.

[Sergey Churikov]

how to disable this new sh*t and back get old editor? I don't want to learn your new ideas, I need to do my work!

[John M]

So looks like we've lost the ability to add simple borders to images even. It's a practical feature especially when publishing screenshots of apps with a white background.

[Charisma Riley]

. . . or the ability to add images, one-at-time, per line. That’s so fun. Also, importing an image with a transparent background renders the background white. Also *super* fun. If it wasn’t for Atlassian forcing me to use their version of “great documentation”, I’d be lost entirely. TGFA. *smh* Said no one ever.

[Helen Gosper]

The ability to add a border to an image, eg a screenshot of an app on a white background, (as John comments above) is such a basic expectation for people doing product documentation.  

I'd like to hear the justification behind the decision to remove the feature, please Atlassian. 

In fact, I'd like to hear why so much of this basic functionality was deprecated. 

[Tom Crowley]

@Avinoam I think we're owed a webinar or call or presentation or something in which someone from the business gives us, the users, some valid reasons why some of these changes were made and the chance to protest them. We're also owed a more detailed and specific plan on when other basic features like the one mentioned above can be expected.

I know responding to negative feedback isn't fun, and you (Atlassian) are getting a fair amount of abuse on here, but it's because the changes you are making to the tool we use every day to do our jobs are actively making our lives harder. If I was the architect behind my company's recent move to Confluence, I would have cancelled it. Made do with what we have now and checked back in a few years. But that's out of my control. Some of us have already abandoned Cloud; many of us can't. And many of us don't want to. Confluence can be a very helpful tool, but you can't ruin all of your customers' work because you need to change the back-end. 

If you're not taking the view that you can lose a few small customers because everyone else is tied in because of the cost of switching, then you need to demonstrate that. Yes, many of us won't leave, so you'll still have our monthly subscriptions, but can any of us honestly recommend Confluence now? We might carry on using Cloud, but we're not going to be happy about it. And misery loves company, so the harder our jobs become, the harder your jobs will be.

I hope as a team you are also holding a pretty thorough recap of the whole process and learning lessons from this so that future changes aren't handled as poorly. We have not been properly consulted on this matter, and even the forums such as this one that were set up for us to provide feedback don't feel like they're being taken seriously.

Also, given that a good number of us are probably documentarians of some form, you really need to make sure your Cloud documentation is current. Yes, it's hard in transitional stages, but you should have thought about that before you changed everything.

I, and I assume 'we', await your responses. 

[Tom Crowley]

Apparently a webinar is planned. I only discovered it by accident, but it's here: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-Cloud-articles/New-features-in-Confluence-webinar/ba-p/1170466#U1175146

I added my above comment to the webinar announcement page, too, since what they are proposing doesn't sound too helpful.

If anyone has anything else to add with regards to communications, I suggest doing it on the webinar announcement page maybe?

[Tom Crowley]

Argh. I also now realise that it is today/tomorrow, so I'm too late and also on leave for the Europe session.

So much for that idea.

[Nicole]

Thanks for the heads up regarding the webinar! I would've missed this had you not posted about it.

[Shaun Sheehan]

Ditto thanks on the webinar heads up! I wasn't aware either until I saw your comment come through. @Tom Crowley 

[kpink]

Having an issue with templates,  can't get the name default to work with or without variables. Also can't have labels pre-defined.  Causes all kinds of problems for our meeting minutes and task lists.  Please Atlassian, give us a way to go back to the editor that worked until all these issues sorted out

[jim mason]

returning to the old editor or providing it's full functional equivalent works. need this asap.

[kpink]

Update on Templates.  It is a bug with the new editor when using the create from macro.  APparently works ok if you just add the page using the template and the standard Create Page.  So much for making it easy for users

[Michael Corvin]

<repeated face palms>  a typical workflow I create for our users is a custom template with labels and page properties with a create page button at the top of the page properties summary list of the pages created by the users...

I've got so much dev/support to do on our server sites I'm just going to ignore all this cloud version churn and tell our users to just use our cloud site for rough notes at their own peril and frustration...

[Christopher Combes]

Creating documents from templates is broken.  The only page I can create from a "template" is a "Blank Page".  Clicking "+" > Any Template > Create does not work.  The dialog just sits there.  No feedback.  This is basic basic functionality.  So frustrated with this "new" experience.

Am I the only one having this problem?  I don't have time to be filing bug reports for basic functionality. 

[Christopher Combes]

Some of the templates show a "Next" button and that's not working either. Using Safari browser.  Sigh.... In between typing these - all of the sudden it's working again.  I spent 20 minutes clicking on the "Create" and "Next" buttons. 

[kpink]

when I tried their workaround I realized that the page name comes from the Create from Template macro which is what they say is broken. Have we hit the point yet where the problems with the new editor far outweigh the advantages.  Afterall, this is a wiki and if we cannot use the editor it is of limited use.  PLEASE give us a way to go back to the old editor until the regressions with basic functionality we rely on is fixed

thanks

[JoAnna Black]

Currently unable to add comments to legacy pages. The box is there but if I click in it to add a comments, I get a grey pinwheel that won't stop turning.

[Huw Griffiths]

just spent a good 6 hrs on a Gliffy diagram, only for the new editor to stuff up the publishing - seems it wants to limit the width of my diagram to a 1/3 of the screen within the available page even though I've selected the "full width" toggle.   Just what I wanted, a picture which conveys only a 1/3 of the information it was intended to,  Back to Visio then. I'm sure Gliffy will thank Atlassian!

[Michael Corvin]

FYI, try draw.io (standalone, as its behavior in the 'new experience' may also be warped and mangled) - very nice to use and for most any diagrams that don't require dimensioning (eg actual layouts, architecture, etc) it's much slicker than ol' clunky battleship Win-only Visio. The draw.io plugin for Confluence works well (we have it on some of our server sites that still have the stable, old-school 'experience') and you can get free desktop versions.

[Huw Griffiths]

Thanks for that suggestion Michael - I'll check out draw.io!