Confluence 4.1.x
User's Guide
The Confluence User's Guide is for project managers, developers, testers – anyone who uses Confluence. New to Confluence? Start by exploring the Confluence dashboard and learning about spaces, pages and blog posts. Try creating a new space, then add a page to that space, add some content and a comment to that page and then export the page to PDF. Using the SharePoint Connector? Visit the SharePoint Connector User's Guide. Want to build up your skills from white belt (beginner) to Confluence master? Try our wiki ninja tutorial. Interested in what other people are doing with Confluence or want to share your own tips? See our tips via Twitter and tips of the trade pages.
Administrator's Guide
The Confluence Administrator's Guide is for people with Confluence administration rights. It will help you set up users and groups, security for users, groups and spaces, and keep track of any changes and updates made within your Confluence site. You may want to customise the look and feel of Confluence, by applying a theme to a space or modifying colour schemes and layouts. Admin tasks such as backup are also covered. You may also find the Knowledge Base, FAQ and Atlassian Answers useful. If you are using the Confluence SharePoint Connector, see the SharePoint Connector Administrator's Guide.
Installation Guide
The Confluence Installation Guide is for people who are installing Confluence for the first time. Check the requirements and supported platforms, then download and install Confluence. Where to next? The Confluence 101 will help you get started. When setting up Confluence, load the Example Site ('Demonstration Space'), which contains a tutorial and additional content to help you get familiar with using Confluence. For help with installing and configuring the Confluence SharePoint Connector, see the SharePoint Connector Installation and Upgrade Guide. If you are using other Atlassian products, take a look at the Integration Guide.
Upgrade Guide
The Confluence Upgrade Guide is for people who are upgrading their instance of Confluence. Start by reading the latest Release Notes, the Upgrade Notes Overview and version-specific Upgrade Notes for the version to which you are upgrading. Then, download Confluence and follow the main Upgrade Guide.
Developer Resources
These resources are for software developers who want to create their own plugins for Confluence and use the Confluence APIs. Take a look at the Confluence developer documentation and the API documentation. You may also find the developer topics on Atlassian Answers useful.
23 Comments
Hide/Show CommentsNov 01, 2011
Ole Kværnø
Is there a downgrade guide? I.e how to move from 4.0 back to 3.5?
We thought Atlassian would release _edit of wiki-markup_, or at least _copy of wiki-markup_ soon after the 4.0 release. Our wait for search & replace seems in vain...
Dec 20, 2011
Anonymous
The users just needed syntax highlighting for wiki markup edit sessions or something similar. If the wiki tag editor definitely won't come back again my company will stay with 3.5 forever or switch to another vendor.
The new editor was obviously introduced for two percent off the users which are too stupid learning the couple of tags they would need usually on a regular working day.
Now we 98 percent have to suffer because of this ridiculous decision.
Maintaining complex wiki pages has become a real nightmare - you've transformed a flexible wiki into a web-based CMS of the 90ies.
Sorry guys but the 4.x release was an epic fail and any downgrade guide/patch will be appreciated by all poor souls who have upgraded.
Dec 20, 2011
John Masson [Atlassian]
Hi Anonymous,
We're collecting feedback on our Confluence 4.0 Editor - Customer Feedback page. Once you've had a chance to try out 4.1 I'd love to get your thoughts.
Thanks,
John
Dec 20, 2011
John Masson [Atlassian]
Hi Ole,
Hopefully you saw the notification on the feedback page, but Find & Replace was released as part of 4.1. Let me know how you find it.
Thanks,
John
Nov 22, 2011
Susan Grodsky
Hey Atlassian folks. You are probably receiving fewer complaints about 4.0 now than you did 6 months ago. You shouldn't interpret that as folks getting used to 4.0 and accepting it. This is not so. But those of us who are stuck with it (for now) don't have time to complain. That is because operations that were one keystroke in wiki markup are dozens in 4.0.
For example: the graphic on my page is not indented as it should be. I can fix that in one keystroke in markup. In 4.0 I have to open the wiki markup dbox, enter the markup, and save.
Then, when I notice the markup was not interpreted correctly (my typo) I have to reopen the dbox and enter it all again. I cannot even edit the existing dbox!
Confluence 4.0 – if you loved your typewriter, you'll love 4.0.
Nov 22, 2011
Matt Hodges [Atlassian]
Susan, not sure if you knew this, but you can also indent images/graphics in a single-click using the Indent buttons in the editor toolbar. See this video for a demo.
Dec 13, 2011
Susan Grodsky
Matt, thanks for the tip, but the indent button does not reliably indent the correct amount. So it is often useless.
Dec 20, 2011
John Masson [Atlassian]
Hi Susan,
If you could leave a comment on the Confluence 4.0 Editor - Customer Feedback page with some quite notes on your browser, os and what you did I'll get it looked into.
Thanks,
John
Jan 17, 2012
Gary Brown
I have found a way to get wiki markup directly recognized by the RTF editor. Go to your Profile in Confluence, click the Settings tab, click Editor under Your Settings, and then click the Edit button. Uncheck the Disable Autoformatting checkbox and then click the Submit button. You can now directly enter wiki markup and the RTF editor will convert it on-the-fly into XHTML-based RTF.
Dec 13, 2011
Anonymous
I find the wysiwyg editor to take me significantly longer than the direct markup editor. An example is that I like to put a status note at the top of a page, one of tip, note, or warning. In the old system, changing the type was trivial. With the new editor, I have to delete the old widget, insert a new one, edit it to modify the text, etc, instead of just changing a single word of markup. Frustrating.
Dec 21, 2011
John Masson [Atlassian]
Hi Anonymous,
This has been raised, documented and a JIRA case created on the Confluence 4.0 Editor - Customer Feedback page, you might like to put a watch on it and the JIRA case for updates.
Thanks,
John
Dec 14, 2011
Anonymous
I love that you guys have a good wysiwyg editor. Not speaking for much use of it but modifying markup is a full time job in itself so whatever eases the burden of making a page look decent is okay by me. Thanks a lot guys for your hard work!
Also, is there a way to remove the example site once it's been installed?
Dec 16, 2011
Anonymous
I'll second that - a good WYSIWYG editor would be great!
Dec 16, 2011
Anonymous
Is it permitted to copy some parts from this official documentation to create a more customized help section for our own site when including a reference to the specific page of this doc?
Dec 18, 2011
Paul Watson [Atlassian Technical Writer]
Hi there,
The short answer is yes. Please view the Creative Commons license, via the link at the bottom of this page.
regards, Paul
Jan 02, 2012
Anonymous
I have been for years a big fan of your wiki engine and had my engineering team to use it as the primary repository for all engineering documentation, and also at home for personal docs. Fantastic tool and, what I loved the most was the support for two very distinct types of users : non technical person (such as tech writer or my wife !) would use the WYSIWYG editor, engineers instead would use the markup. In fact, as engineers, we often use various scripts to generate wiki markup content based on whatever internal input (for example sql table defs).
From the start I always found the WYSIWYG editor to be totally unusable when trying to do any advanced editing (and the wiki markup always pointed out how badly the WYSIWYG messed up with content), and this has not changed with 4.1. Just tried the latest version, with various editing, nothing really fancy, and immediately I had issues. Reading the related thread, it almost seem as if Jira's answer to "we want markup back" is "we'll give you search & replace feature". This is totally off track.
I had a clear road-map with your products but it is now becoming: "how long can I keep using 3.5.x given that we also use other atlassian tools".
PLEASE. Most of your users are engineers, fed up with limitations of WYSIWYG editor. We are not asking for the return of LaTeX editor... but your markup was a good trade-off. Looking forward to reading some updates from you on this.
Thanks,
Amedee Potier
Jan 02, 2012
Matt Hodges [Atlassian]
Hi Amedee, have you seen this page – Confluence 4.0 Editor - Customer Feedback? I'd encourage you to take a look at it and elaborate on the issues you had with Confluence 4.1. We're committed to fixing issues in the new editor and specific details really help.
Lastly, you might not be aware, but the new editor uses a different storage format - this is the primary reason there is no wiki markup editor anymore. Arsenale, an Atlassian Expert, have just released a plugin for Confluence 4.x which allows you to edit the source of a page. See the Invisible Ink plugin for more details.
Jan 03, 2012
Anonymous
Thank you Matt ! Indeed, the Arsenale Invisible Ink looks like a good alternative. Am definitely going to try it ! Sorry for pushing this subject on the main doc page instead of the dedicated Editor Customer Feedback page. Appreciate your quick and encouraging feedback.
And, by the way, happy new year to you and all the atlassian team.
Jan 05, 2012
Anonymous
The User Community pages are throwing HTTP 500 errors. Can't get to any of the goodness located there :/
Jan 05, 2012
Jeremy Largman [Atlassian]
Thanks for posting. It's actually only a problem when visiting a tag anonymously. You can go to the root https://answers.atlassian.com, log in, and visit any tag or ask a question from there.
We should have the bug fixed shortly. You can track it at ANSWERS-366.
Jan 05, 2012
Anonymous
I really like confluence but why oh why is it so darned hard to find help for things. It seems every time i try to do something new i have to spend a minimum of 2 hours researching stuff to find the answers I need.
This time i haven't been able to find the info i need. Please tell me that there is some way to incorporate a template which uses a table in confluence 3.3. I am literally beating my head against a wall trying to figure out how to do this. I simply do not grok why it should be such a chore to find help for the simplest things. I am really frustrated.
Jan 05, 2012
Jeremy Largman [Atlassian]
The Scaffolding plugin might help. There's some documentation on their site about dynamic table data.
Now, as for finding that info, you're right. How were you to know that this is buried in a plugin called 'scaffolding'? Organizing all the knowledge here at Atlassian is a major challenge. We are a very open company - publishing our bugs, hosting a community, allowing the public to comment and edit our documentation, post plugins, and host content on their own sites (like above) - it all adds up to a difficult challenge! Please email me if you're interested in talking more about how we could improve our search. Knowledge management (which includes making all this info discoverable) will be my focus this year.
Jan 17, 2012
Gary Brown
Is there any way to found out how many Confluence pages a user has created (or edited) in the prior year. The documentation does not appear to even address anything remotely like this. We have an annual performance review and it would be great to easily find out how many pages one has created (original author) and how many one has edited (contributor).
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