Why did you remove the Wiki Markup editor?

Question

I have used Confluence since 2006 and I have to say that the worst desicion you've made was removing the wiki markup editor. Could you at least fix the "insert wiki-markup" macro so that it would be possible to edit content using the markup syntax? Now the wiki markup box disappears when writing something into it...

e.g.

1. Insert a wiki markup macro in to a page

2. Add content into the wiki markup macro (for example !image_file_name!

3. Save the page

4. Edit the page

5. The wiki markup box would still be editable, e.g. to make the image as thumbnail, simply add !thumbnail| before the name of the image file.

Please, bring the markup back!

Bob Swift · Answer

Bill, just keep using wiki markup via Confluence Wiki Plugin on both 4.x and 3.5 instances. When you push the content back to 3.5, strip out the storage format wrapper around the wiki macro. If you are using the Confluence Command Line Interface to move the data, consider creating an issue to have the CLI do exactly that under the covers when copying pages back to 3.x.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

Bill, I'm afraid you're missing the point - there is no wiki markup.  The editor understands it (mostly) and translates it into the new storage format, but there is no wiki markup anywhere.  No source, no reverse-engineering from the new storage - it's gone.

In my experience, I'm starting to feel Atlassian may have shot themselves in the foot with this one.  The new editor is excellent compared with the old two-editors-and-the-RTE-is-painfully-bad-at-some-things system.  The fact it accepts wiki markup is very helpful for converting.  But the inability to paste markup, or more importantly, "debug" the raw storage is failing a LOT of Confluence users.  Around here, the market for "confluence administrators" has dried up, except for "we want someone to help us convert to something else" contracts.  Sad, but I think that unless Atlassian really put some effort into addressing the problems, Confluence is a dead end.

Bill Barnes · Answer

Please bring back the wiki mark up editor ... or at lease make view source the wiki mark up.  We are working on a project now where we need to publish pages from 4.x to a 3.5.x wiki instance.   the Word export / import is buggy - losses formating.   We end up exporting in PDF and then attaching the 4.x  PDF to the 3.5.x page.   Cut and paste from RTE to RTE does not owrk either.   At a minimum, make view source the View wiki Markup.