What just happened to Confluence Cloud?

[Helen Griffith]

@Abhay Patil - wow, that's a lot of whitespace... I've not noticed that (yet).

[Helen Griffith]

@Bruno Miretti - no, I didn't get the email from Liron... @Liron, is there any chance I can keep my different spaces' colors?

[Michael Corvin]

Point taken.

The thing is, Confluence is now so feature- and capability-rich that it spans the gamut from being used in the original spirit of wiki-wiki, with the focus on simple collaboration through basically formatted text and image content, all the way up to enterprise documentation and integration with other tools.

It has transcended wiki-wiki and is getting closer to being usable as a fully collaborative hypermedia knowledge capture and creation space.

This is something some of us have been envisioning for years - if it can be bent (configured...) to our evil will (cue maniacal laughter...).  With page content serving as input front ends or live outputs from other tools, using labels/page properties/reports to auto-index content, using Comala Workflows for traceable CM of content, etc., the potential utility is massive.

Something like Sharepoint or other 'content managers' are not even comparable because they are still totally mired in the "dead tree" document paradigm of managing files, not actual hypermedia content.  Old school notions of "documents" need to be replaced by versioned slices through versioned atomic elements of the hypermedia space... and those nodes may themselves be portals into other spaces or functionality or actually reflect executable processes.

Having UI configurability available helps enables this: site and space layout, where the menu elements are, how they look (icon, font, size, color, default pop-out state) and which of the items available on that menu element are displayed (icon, font, color, order, spacing, etc) should be configurable, as should be the default page layout, fonts, etc.

Perhaps I'm asking for too much...

But... 20 years ago I was fully documenting and executing GN&C design and validation processes in an early hypermedia environment.

[Robert Lauriston]

Atlassian's notion that spaces should be consistent demonstrates a profound lack of knowledge about how some people use Confluence.

Or maybe they do know, but don't think it's enough customers to bother with, especially when third-party plugin vendors may pick up the slack.

[Abhay Patil]

I believe both "consistency" and "configurability" should be within reason. Both should be kept simple. While I will vote for allowing different colours for spaces as a SIMPLE configurability option (even if it compromises "consistency", if you will) - but for nothing fancier than that.  Similarly, content is the key artifact in Confluence, so I agree with Atlassian that configurability should be limited.

(I have some new users complaining that Confluence editor is not as rich as Word! Of course, I tell them. It is there for collaboratively creating content  - not for creating industrial strength webpages and documents.)

[Michael Corvin]

These changes are going in entirely the wrong direction.

Rather than constraining configurability and functional extensibility, Atlassian should be enhancing configurability, enabling site administrator/developers to totally customize the look, layout and what functionality is presented on different sites, spaces and pages in Confluence (and JIRA, for that matter).

Yes it should come 'out of the box' with one (or more) slick, fully functional UI look, layout, color scheme, and presented functionality that a significant portion of the customer base will use with few changes.

But, the same way that we use many custom page templates with page layouts and interacting sets of macros, the entire site and individual spaces should be fully configurable.   Some customer teams may then create radically reconfigured solutions for entirely new use cases which could benefit you when shared with the community.

Totally agree with Helen - sometimes you want spaces to be instantly recognizable, not 'all the same for consistency'.

IFF you've implemented with a clean separation of responsibilities architecture (model-view-controller...) you should end up with a toolkit of functionality that the Atlassian devs use to configure the 'default' site - just expose that to the user admins.    

Two of the best things about Confluence have been the macro extensibility and the REST API.   Why not extend that to full site configurability?

[Michael Corvin]

Hi - is it your custom page creation templates that have broken?    That would really be a huge problem for us...   or just the site look template?

[Abhay Patil]

@Martin Sauter and @Helen Griffith: Check below the same page in "old" and "new" experience. (I had to shrink new page to show all the extra spaces - have added arrows to highlight.) Old experience is compact - new one too sparse!

[Lisa de Araujo]

Seems our custom templates have broken as well. This inability to brand the pages makes it now unsuitable for external use. 

Is this something that will also be implemented on the self-hosted version or shall we start looking for something else that integrates with Jira?

[Bruno Miretti]

All I've been able to keep is my customized colored headings. I used to add a picture in the navigation bar, lost too...

For your answer, I did receive this mail from Liron. Didn't you ?

Space colors and the new Confluence
Hi Bruno,
My name's Liron, and I'm a product manager on the Confluence team.
You may have heard we're rolling out a shiny new version of Confluence, and there are some big visual changes. As part of the process, I'm writing to let you know that we've decided to remove the ability to set a color scheme for each space. Our analytics show that one or more of the spaces on your site are using a custom color scheme.
We're removing custom color schemes for spaces to provide a consistent experience for Confluence users, where the colors of text, links, headings, and navigation items don't negatively affect readability or accessibility. You can still have an avatar for each space, and brand your Confluence site by adding a logo, title, and color for the global sidebar. To provide an easy transition, we'll automatically migrate existing logos and header colors (if you have them) to the new sidebar for you.

[Helen Griffith]

Anyone found a way to change the colour of anything?!

The old UI enabled me to change the colour of the navigation bar across the top of the space. While it was only a tiny bit of customization, it meant I could see quite quickly whether I was in the right space or not. Now all my spaces look the same at a glance. If I go to Look and Feel -- Themes, I have no 'themes' to choose. It seems that I have to install an add-on from the Marketplace. The only applicable add-on (RefinedSpaces for Confluence Cloud) gets really bad reviews, nor is it free. At this point, I don't want to pay another penny (cent!) for the tool.

Is this another thing that's been taken away?

[Helen Griffith]

This sounds familiar... Is it where Confluence adds a blank line before and after lots of macros? You can delete them but they immediately reappear?

[Martin Sauter]

OK, probably I didn't get the difference between some JIRA Tickets mentioned elsewhere in the discussion an Support Tickets. No problem.

[Liron]

Perhaps because support tickets arent public?

[Martin Sauter]

@LironI would love the read your reply, but when I follow the link posted above, all I get is a message saying «You do not have permission to view this request.» What's the reason for this?

[Till Noever]

Jim,

Thanks for your comments. Inclined to agree with most of what you wrote.

And, yes, Liron is doing a good job. Not easy being on the customer-comms coalface. (Been there, too.)

[Jim Brent]

Hi Liron,

Sounds like I might be wrong... Nothing could make me happier.

;-)

Best wishes.

Jim

[Liron]

This is great! I will make sure your names are added to our list of users to contact for our next round of interviews!

Liron

[Liron]

Just replied to you there!

[Abhay Patil]

@Liron I have created a support ticket for an issue for "too much of white space" in a simple page. I have included screenshots of the same page in old and new UI to highlight how it looks inelegant and sparse in the new UI. Please check https://getsupport.atlassian.com/servicedesk/customer/portal/23/JST-320593

[Monique vdB]

@Susan Ostreicher done! 

[Susan Ostreicher]

@Monique vdB, can you please share my email for user research too?  Thanks!

[Monique vdB]

Done, @Abhay Patil :) 

[Abhay Patil]

That would be great. Thanks.

[Monique vdB]

I can facilitate as well, since we don't yet have direct messaging -- if anyone would like me to share their email address with @Liron directly, I can do so.