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@Ryan Donahue sorry to hear you're having issues with the meeting notes template. Would love to hear more about what you mean when you say not functional?
Hi Avinoam, thanks for taking the time to read through these!
I really need the ability to easily link images that already exist on the site without uploading a new copy.. we rely heavily on sharing images between pages (of charts) that don't update automatically if each page has its own copy, meaning a lot of error-prone manual re-linking on our part.
Very happy to see some positive feedback and progress from Atlassian on the many issues with the Fabric Editor now. Thank you @Avinoam. We have spent a lot of time on testing and reporting issues over the past couple of weeks.
Putting in your own carefully considered and well-written bugs in the bug tracker? What a dream customer, they should send you a tshirt!
@Avinoam Thanks for the work and updates thus far! Do you know when a floating table of contents will become available? There have been many queries about this over the years but no viable solutions yet. It would be immensely helpful.
Cheers,
Mike
@Mike MacDonald - that's interesting...can you elaborate how you'd see that working and what the main use case would be from your perspective?
A floating TOC would be great, as it supports browsing and navigation on long pages of content. However, some thought would need to be put in the UI execution of this.
won't fixed in 2016 https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-33264
Also there are a ton of forum threads about this going back almost 10 years. there's also this that is still active https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFSERVER-56379 but it's for server and they're removing the DIV tag from cloud so...
Hello,
After being ported from one Cloud Server to another (due to page loading issues), we had the new Confluence (without warnings). We are happy to see some of the changes but unfortunately we are getting more setbacks :(. Here's some feedback from the team (so far):
1) Why is everything centre aligned? Tables that were previously all aligned properly are now right in the centre and as rigid as it is, is only fixed width. Not only is it hogging real estate during edit, the displays do not sync with what we had. We are not going to go through the hundreds/thousands of tables that we have previously gone through to fit it from x document into Confluence all over again.
2) Please bring back the comments section in the page (post publishing). The comments allows us to have a quick glance of changes especially for audits and reporting of changes in each document. We have a monthly reporting on documents changed and what was updated as we need to adhere to compliance.
3) Our templates are now useless as well. We have many templates that had text boxes and drop down boxes to be filled upon creation with the "$" symbol. This is now non-existent. Along with the irregular centre aligned table alignments, it throws the whole template off and the results are horrid. We have reports generated via these templates daily and this does not help with the monthly and yearly reports being affected as well.
Please note that these feedback are only from less than a weeks worth of being in the new Confluence environment.
@Patricia thank you so much for taking the time to articulate your struggles and sharing the openly!
I'll do my best to address each point as best as I can, also leveraging documentation that explains this better than I probably could in a comment:
1. Center aligned is due to the massive feedback we received on the old editor that it's extremely difficult to have great-looking by-default pages, especially across any screen size. Center aligned allows for predictability of content and responsiveness at the same time. Is the main pain your referring to related to a page with the old editor being migrated to the new editor, or are you referring more to new pages you create using the new editor?
This page can also provide broader context: https://confluence.atlassian.com/confcloud/confluence-editing-improvements-945107733.html
2. To make sure we can capture all the sentiment for the "what's changed" comment section when publishing, I've gone ahead and created a suggestion here https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-65695, please share with your colleagues and peers and upvote so we can gauge as much feedback as possible - it helps us prioritize!
3. I believe you are referring to template variables which are on our roadmap and planned to come back. Please have a look at https://confluence.atlassian.com/confcloud/confluence-cloud-editor-roadmap-967314556.html for more information in general - would love your feedback!
I'm sure this doesn't alleviate your situation completely, but I hope it provides some more visibility. Please let me know if you'd like to organize a call as I'd love to learn more with examples what you and your company are going through so we can see what we can do to help.
1. The column macro is a mess and if people wanted center alignment you could do it with the page layout system that previously existed. Unless 100% of your users complained you kind of threw everyone else under the bus without supporting anything remotely close to legacy design (no asymmetric columns/sidebars). Also, tables in particular are even more of a mess, not being able to change width of columns would be fine if the dynamic widths work but they dont, and you cant resize images either. It feels like it wasn't actually used by an end user in any real world environment before being pushed out the door.
also "Columns resize dynamically, without the option to choose between fixed or responsive resizing." seems like you're stating a bug not how a feature has been improved. This is a step backward.
3. the words Variables or template or blueprint do not appear on that page my dude.
@Avinoam
Sorry, but center alignment is killing technical documentation.
I can understand that there is use for it for certain types of content, but force feeding it to everyone is just plain wrong.
Same for not being able to set the width of a table
Although there are nice features in the new editor ( the / menu to name one), it still feels like a huge step back in being able to write useful documentation
@Freek D_Hooge regarding not being able to set width of a table, are you referring to that in general or the current bug with table column resizing?
Either way, the former is available using the handle at the top right of the table and the latter is a known bug which should be resolved very soon.
Hi,
Thanks for the follow-up.
The behavior I'm talking about is documented in the cloud editor roadmap (Table sizing and resizing), So I don't think it is a bug.
Under the new behavior I can only set the table to center, wide or full width, which is a step back from the control you had in the old editor. Same for not being able to set a column width to fixed.
As I said, I do understand the efforts for making content better looking across different screen sizes, but I don't understand why this requires taking away existing control.
Just let users have the possibility to either create responsive pages or "standard" pages.
This change seems really unfriendly and, honestly, quite hostile to my users, the support folks who rely on our Internal Release Notes Confluence pages to support our product. Never once in three years did I hear any complaints about the layout of the page, or a desire to have "great-looking" pages. Our users want to quickly and easily find information when they have to help solve an issue, and that information is best found and processed in tables that need to be as wide and flexible as possible to store all the information, including links to Jira issues (which can get fairly long), that they contain.
Using Confluence and having it well-adopted has been a big win for us as a company, and I am a huge fan. But I think this blanket change to the page layout, and the way it's being handled, is extremely disappointing.
Have you tested this new experience on larger, high resolution screens? I find it very hard to understand how great-looking by-default pages translates into pages where the default is to have a side bar to the left, then one third of the screen blank, then some squished in text and then another third of the page blank.
If you're going to copy this type of artice format, at least don't have a side menu as that ruins the experience like this. Instead, have a top menu.
This is definitely not an experience I am looking forward to introducing to my team.
Centre-aligning images, particularly small ones, makes reading pages hard, because there is a big chunk of white space before the image and it's not in line with the rest of the text. Short centred text means you're constantly changing lines as you read, which is more eye strain.
I'm pretty sure there's quite a lot of research about things like this. But I guess reading up on good UI design would be a bit much of an ask...
I just lost hours of work when another user started editing a draft they had open from earlier.
Knowing this is possible, I won't be using this feature for collaborative writing again.
@Josh Amos that is terrible! I'll be reaching out in a separate email.
Hi all!
First off, I want to thank everyone for sharing the good the bad and the ugly with us here so openly! Taking the time to articulate your feedback is not trivial nor taken for granted, and needless to say is extremely helpful for the team.
Based on your feedback, we felt one of the immediate helpful resources we can provide publically for increased visibility is a public new editor roadmap https://confluence.atlassian.com/confcloud/confluence-cloud-editor-roadmap-967314556.html. (this is meant to compliment the current page https://confluence.atlassian.com/confcloud/confluence-editing-improvements-945107733.html.
Please have a look and let us know how we can make it useful for you.
Thank you!
Avinoam
Hi @Avinoam
Since the new editor deprecated core functionality for us (linking images from other pages), will access to the old editor be preserved, or should I start evaluating alternate solutions? The excerpt workaround may work for us, but if it doesn't I will have a user-mutiny on my hands.
@Ryan Donahue that's a great call out. We actually didn't deprecate that so I'm linking to the suggestion here in the meanwhile https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-65640, but we'll be adding that to the coming soon section of our public roadmap here https://confluence.atlassian.com/confcloud/confluence-cloud-editor-roadmap-967314556.html.
There are no dates, months, quarters, any type of delineation of time scale on when these things will happen. This kind of misses the 2nd part of the definition of a road-map.
Liking the gifs as part of showing what's new, as opposed to just static screen captures. Also, perhaps a "workaround" page would be good for possible situations that we are currently facing after the transition is made to the new Confluence while awaiting for bug fixes or possible updates? And perhaps to address the transition on what it previously was, to what it is currently.
Hi @Avinoam , the road map shows Tasks as a green tick in both the old and new editors, but the new editor does not support nested tasks which is a pretty essential feature for our workflow (see https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-65755).
Can the road map be updated to acknowledge this short-coming and possible fix timeframe?
@Dave Jennings that is a great call out! We'll add that right away. It's actually in the works so we'll be sure to let the community know once it's live.
@Avinoam why don't tasks like this get updated in the publicly facing jira if they're in active development? It's currently set to gathering interest.
@Cameron LaBorde-Zank you're right. We do our very best to keep everything up to date. We're adding this to the documentation as we speak.
Thanks, i only mention it because I feel like i see shipped features still left in "gathering interest" and it really erodes any faith in that system for getting requests in front of anyone who can do something about them.
Since these comments actually reach to page 7, it was hard to find these recently replied-to comments without reading the whole comment string again.
Hi all - quick update on https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-65284 (The column width adjustment is not reflected in the new editor), a fix is out and I've resolved the ticket. Please keep us honest as always with your feedback!
Cool:
Not being able to resize images in columns and tables is a huge frustration for me in the new editor.
https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-65573
Same is true for the Column macro AKA the replacement for the page layout function.
ok, to strengthen my point about the forced center alignment.
Below are 2 screenshots with the same content. The first in the old editor, the second in the new editor.
Now tell me, which is more clear?
Aside from the center alignment, it also looks like the code macro has been dumbed down. You can no longer choose if you want line numbers or not. If it should be collapsed (very useful to keep the flow if you have large sections of log output of large code sections), nor can you choose the theme.
And on top of that the syntax highlighter seems to be broken (the above was set to sql), causing the alignment to be wrong and misinterpreting characters.
I can open tickets to fix the syntax highlighting, but the thing is that the whole design concept behind the new editor is wrong. It is removing control from the users, emphasizing on "responsive" (only using 1/3th of my screen is not very responsive) and just offers less options than the old editor.
This is not a step forward, but multiple steps backwards.
In the past months we have been in the process of rolling out Confluence in our company and so far my users have been very enthusiastic. But I can tell you that if this new editor had been activated when we reviewed Confluence, we would have chosen a different product.
I honestly don't understand how they released this ... the old edit was perfectly fine.
The code macro ... OMG!.
Do the product managers for Confluence actually use the product? Are they just justifying their jobs? I really don't get it.
This made me rethink my dependence on Confluence.
Copying pages does not appear to work.
Steps:
Is everyone else able to copy pages? Perhaps I am doing something wrong?
I tried copying a table containing images to another page but then all of the images show as broken links. I then tried to use the "Copy" command so that I could then delete the content not needed but "Copy" is broken.
I'm also seeing random crashes occurring resulting in a dump of debug information from the server - frightening. Why are paying customers being used to perform beta testing?
There appears to be so many things wrong with the new editor it makes the product unusable at this point. The Confluence that I really enjoyed using for years is now a broken product. I was excited to be recording all of my notes for projects, but with the new editor the functionality is so buggy I fear losing content. Really frustrated by this. I want the old editor back! Just make it a settings option - "Use Legacy Confluence" - Checkbox. Don't force this on us. I may have to switch to simply using Apple Pages or something. I'm searching for alternatives to Confluence. Any suggestions appreciated.
There are tons of issues with the new way that confluence displays media. For one it caches everything on load so if you happen to have huge video files on a page it can completely break the page either resulting in an infinite load OR in a dump of debug spew because it failed. Other services that do this better figured out its best to put a placeholder element for the video and then swap it out with the player when someone actually plays it rather than just load the whole video for every video element. So try less images, the editor is more stable than the display interface, also there appears to be some weird memory leak whenever you publish a page.
But your problem is images? Make sure you're actually uploading the images rather than copy + pasting them. The way confluence handles incoming pasted images is incredibly silly. If that image originated from another web-page it will take the URL and covert it to an image by linking to the image rather than doing what anyone would want which is for it to store a local copy of that image. This process also breaks PDF export.
Since the new layout tool ive had nothing but problems copy and pasting from one page to another. It just either doesn't work or doesn't work correctly. Also if you aren't using Chrome TONS of elements don't work right across all of atlassians tools. Really cool QA process going on there.
I was told by support initially that they were unable to swap you back to the old editor. Only after escalating an issue (hey you cant edit the product requirements blueprint AT ALL if its not been edited before) did they swap me back to the old system (without asking) which then meant we had some pages in the new editor, some in the old, and no way to transition the new pages to the old editor. So baaack to the new editor. A day later they "revised" their policy and said they would only be putting people in who opted in to the new editor, however it seems that hasn't been true either as the comments on this post have indicated.
There have been a number of things that caused destructive actions on upgrade to the new editor which is like product roll-out 101 things you don't do.
This is what I do not understand, how is this possible?
There have been a number of things that caused destructive actions on upgrade to the new editor which is like product roll-out 101 things you don't do.
Especially for Tables and Images!!!
1. cannot to insert an image by "copy" and "paste" just like the older editor.
2. cannot not adjust the images in the tables.
@Avinoam I'm sorry to say this but I would just fire the entire product team who built this piece of crap.
WTF are you thinking really? I was moved to the new editor and I can't get back. I already open a ticket, because my pages are all messed up.
@Joao Correia I'm very sorry to hear you feel that way.
I'll be reaching out to you directly.
The thing that kills me is that I abandoned Docs to Confluence, all technical deliverables are in Confluence. Doing this process in my new job and this change just kills technical documentation, especially with no Layouts and the dumb code macro.
I even built an Atlassian Addon:
I usually embrace change, I pushed two organizations to move from docs to create CoE's in Confluence. I honestly dont know what Im going to say to my coleagues when they try to edit a specs template and see it all messed up.
This is so serious it will affect productivity, and undoubtfully my reliance on Confluence needs to be rethinked.
I honestly think you guys screwed up ... big time!.
Right now I just want the old editor back, because I cannot work with the editor like this.
If I could LIKE this comment an infinite number of times, I would.
Hi Atlassian Team,
All of our new pages getting center aligned having same experience when editing pages .
Can we roll back to prior version for now
We raised a support case and seems not responding actively
https://getsupport.atlassian.com/servicedesk/customer/portal/23/JST-456673
Please be kind enough to roll back to prior version which worked perfectly , All of stakeholders in my ORG having odd time due to this . Why we not doing QE after these changes
@Avinoam fyi
And also some pages saying as unsupported content and content can view only on Edit mode
send a support ticket. Demand to speak to senior support tech, eventually they can flip you back to the old editor by default.
Also cool how they said that it was supposed to be opt in now.
Vote this issue up:
@Avinoam Would it be possible to disable that %$*#... ehm... amazing feature which forces page width to only a small column in the middle of a screen? This is the first time in my life I really want to say something nasty while giving feedback... Please... PLEASE... make confluence great again and let us use the old formatting with the new editor... :(
How about just being able to hold onto the legacy formatting? I am really nervous about how this will affect our site when the fabric editor is fully rolled out.
One of the golden rules I abide by as a B2B PM is to not disrupt the workflow of my end users when rolling out software. While consumers will deal with disruptions, business relationships must abide by this rule. My company and Atlassian have a B2B relationship, I'm troubled that I feel like I'm being treated like a B2C user and in effect a tester.
We have many PRDs on our cloud confluence, and as edits come, they're getting mangled by this new and improved editor/formatting. Working with Sri Lankan counterparts, I cannot use confluence for PRDs with this formatting.
A wiki is not just for blogging! It's for all types of content and making the assumption everyone wants the document center aligned like a f*k!n# medium article is just plain wrong. PLEASE BRING THE OLD EDITOR BACK! OUR INSTANCE IS NOW BREAKING! CANT COPY SOME PAGES! SOME PAGES SHOW UNSUPPORTED CONTENT! WHEN YOU EDIT A PAGE YOU DON'T KNOW IF IT'LL BE THE OLD EDITOR OR THE NEW ONE!
BRING THE OLD EDITOR BACK AND FIX THE PAGES YOU BROKE SO I CAN GET ON WITH MY BUSINESS!
Cordial Regards,
Eric Fleming
Our business was planning to roll out Crapfluence across all our sites.
Since the latest update (which btw was not consistent across all our eval instances !#@#@!@#)
Guess what we are planning to do now?
Loving the new editor but the pages do not render correctly in the service desk. It's a huge bummer! They get completely cut off! please let me know when a fix happens for this as we converted several of our articles, which are not usable by our clients.
Also, wanted to note that the Content by Label macro, used for related articles, show the labels even when you check not to. It's a pain since the new editor adds your label to every page, which is confusing our clients.
Melissa can you explain what you mean by "the new editor adds your label to every page"? Is this like...child pages inherit all labels from the parent?
@Avinoam I also like the new editor, but it's frustrating that it is not fully compatible with Jira service desk. Specifically, if we use the two or three column layout in articles, then the content is cut off when viewed through the customer portal. (Also, the columns do not collapse responsively. ) Using the centered single column displays fine.
@Sharon Helms I hear you! We're actively in discussions with the Jira Service Desk teams to work through this.
I have the Confluence Cloud app on IOS and it works fine allowing me to edit older pages, but if I try edit a page created with the new fabric editor, there is an error "Can't edit fabric pages in the old editor on mobile".
When will the confluence cloud app support this ?
@Harry Offer we're actively working on releasing a new editor on mobile in the coming weeks as well - stay tuned for updates!
Ditto - a lot of my documentation work is completed on an iPad. Looking forward to being able to edit pages made with the new editing experience on the iPad.
You could of course positively leverage off the recent ire of your users.
Now that we have had a taste of the good, the bad, the ugly, why not survey some of your users, and get feedback on what features to revert, what to upgrade, and what to do completely differently.
Regards
Richard
Here's hoping at least some of that is already in progress @Richard Franke .
Absolutely @Darryl St_ Pierre and @Richard Franke . More to come on this later this week.
my response to that:
I'm sorry but this is not enough.
The problem is (not only) with the conversion of the existing pages to the new editing experience, it is the new editing experience itself that is the main problem. And I'm not talking about the bugs, I'm talking about the design principle behind the new editing experience itself:
I really don't know which audience you had in mind when designing the new editor, but this new "experience" is making writing technical documentation in Confluence a pain and makes me regret that we choose it last year as our main documentation tool.
And this, while the old (more feature rich) editor made writing documentation so much easier for us.
Loose the forced centering / responsive, bring back the macro features from the old editor, keep the inline ( / ) menu and table editing menu and you have a very nice improvement (if you fix the bugs, that is) over the old editor
But as it is now, its just such a shame
I feel like this new layout is focused on responsive design elements that make the confluence pages more readable on mobile devices. The container spacing and table sizes make sense from a developers perspective, but may seem like a lack of features for people wanting more configurability.
I've been a confluence user for years, and I feel like the user interface is improved. I can keep my hands on the keyboard more of the time (where they're meant to be) as I add elements to my page, but I'm a bit disappointed with the lack of features when compared to the other environment.
I assume it was a big rewrite, but when missing key features like anchors and numbering multilevel lists, it makes it hard to look at for a professional documentation solution until more features are added.
Yes, I can certainly imagine that there is a group of confluence users for which responsiveness is a big feature as their users mostly consume the content on different mobile devices (blogs for instance).
However, there is also a big group of people that write a different type of content.
One that benefits from being able to use their entire screen estate (more technical documentation and procedures).
Sadly this second group is completely ignored by the design principles behind the new editor.
(which does contain nice features, like inline menu and such)
@Freek D_Hooge I can assure you the second group will not be ignored. We're having active discussions on this as I write this response. I will make sure to communicate outcomes as soon as we have clear definitions.
We ONLY use Confluence for Technical Specifications, Product Requirements and related documentation.
I was just forced into new editor and my immediate reaction - anything but loving it. Maybe I will grow to like it but so far it seems it is evolving into blog editors, not a developers tool.
The biggest frustration came from:
1. Not using full width of the page. This only makes me start looking for alternative tool. We are writing specs and knowledge bases. We need all real estate, we don't care about tablets or mobile.
2. Macro? It just disappeared. The speed at which a page can be created has just dropped significantly for no reason.
As I said, this is the first impression. I will give it some, will see.
Most certainly.
As I suggested previously, it may be more productive for Atlassian to generate one (or more) surveys with both pointed and broad questions, each topic allowing for a free input field.
IMHO, if we all have a random rant about Confluence in this space, it will be about things which frustrate us on the day. Capturing just 20% of our views, rather than 80%. Of course, the input to building the first phase of survey(s), may be taken from these posts. One cannot ignore the fact that a large number of users likely cannot be stuffed to verbosely rant in this forum. To be fair, they would assume it was a waste of time, and would achieve nothing.
Confluence is no different from the evolution of JIRA. Back in the days of Mantis and JIRA infancy, the target was very much about software development. (SVN very much a similar case). Then users found additional uses for the tools, and thankfully the developers of JIRA evolved with the demand.
Is there a shortcut available to quickly insert a table row?
@Christopher Combes yes! if you hover over the + icon to add a new row/column you'll see a tooltip with the shortcut.
Attaching mine as an example:
Is there a method to sort table content? I copy/pasted the contents of a large two-column table in Apple Pages to sort it and then pasted it back, making a few adjustments to the formatting.
@Christopher Combes we're working on bringing that back soon, so stay tuned!
I have got two problems with tables with the new editors
1. I cannot see this feature for the new editor.
2. I cannot adjust picture in the cell inserted in the table with the new editor.
I do like the new centered format for blog posts. However, we primarily use Confluence for technical documentation and this new format misses the mark for that as there is no ability to left justify (except by faking it using two columns and only type in the left one). Also, since "columns" is so often used, why hide it in the "/" shortcut? It should be added back at the top.
Why not let users toggle between this new style for blog posts and the previous version for technical documentation? These are two different use cases that shouldn't be forced into a single solution.
I agree with what other folks have been saying about a heads up would have been nice. This changed on us over night and now we are spending a lot of time trying to "fix" the formatting our previous pages as they are auto converting to the new format upon editing.
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