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Hi there, Most of you already know why we removed the wiki markup editor in Confluence 4.0. We pride ourselves on being an open company, so it should be no surprise that we were really upset to learn that a few customers felt we had 'betrayed them' with this decision. Firstly, to those people, we are genuinely sorry that you did not know about this change. We want you to know that we fully understood the enormity of this change for our existing customers - hence why we began communicating our plans over a year in advance in order to give everyone ample time to prepare. We started this process 15 months before shipping Confluence 4.0. During this period we made many public announcements about our intentions, collected tons of feedback throughout our Early Access Program, and built a comprehensive set of resources including:
If you did not hear about the new editor via all of these communiques, we're sorry. We will endeavour to communicate even more in the future, especially should there be another such major update. Collective customer feedback drove this decisionWe listen to our customers – a lot. The number one reason we made the decision to remove the wiki markup editor was the collective feedback we'd been gathering since we first released Confluence in 2004. We've always encouraged you to publicly tell us how we can improve our products and make them work better for your organisation. We can't think of another company that is as open as Atlassian and we're proud of that. Looking at the feedback we received and the things we heard time and time again in countless customer interviews, it was clear as day that the dual editing experience – Wiki Markup and Rich Text – was the number one hindrance to Confluence adoption. The endless cycle of round-tripping bugs made the editor unreliable and unusable for the majority of users, and the lack of advanced features like the ability to merge table cells was stopping you from seeing the full value of Confluence. You told us these things, we listened, and replacing wiki markup was the most viable solution to giving you what customers collectively asked for, a kick-ass editing experience with more powerful editing features. Customers love the new editorHas it been all bad news? No - far from it. We've been thrilled with the overall response from customers so far. Here's a sample of the feedback we've been seeing about the new editor in Confluence 4 – there's much much, much more. I didn't have time to list all of the tweets, emails and "Contact the CEO" submissions we've received:
Yet... there are two sides to every storyUp front communication and listening to users aside, we're not blind to the fact that there are customers who were completely happy with the wiki markup editor and don't see the need for a change. Don't get us wrong, we do understand their point of view. They just want a wiki markup editor and we understand their frustration at our decision to replace it with a higher fidelity storage format. We still believe we made the best decision based on the collective feedback we received from the majority of our customers over the years – but, being completely frank, wiki markup is not coming back. The new editor is our path going forward. We've been listening to your feedbackThanks to all of you who took the time to provide constructive feedback about the new editor. You've helped us highlight issues that we need to address. Our Confluence team has been working really hard to get the following features and fixes into your hands: 1. Find and Replace within the editor – shipped in Confluence 4.1 We're 110% committed to making the new editor an even more kick-ass, reliable editing experience. Truly the best editing experience in the world. We've made huge leaps in the last year - but we're not done yet. We have a team of passionate, dedicated developers working full time to improve the editor and address niggles that arise. We're building a source editor!We've learned from your feedback that customers have a number of valid reasons for directly editing the source of a page:
Since we realise how important source access is to you, we're currently working on a free "Advanced Editor" plugin that will allow your users to edit your page's source amongst other advanced user editing. We hope it will address the major issues that some users have identified, like the ability to search for and update URLs and the file names of embedded images. You can check out and comment on the spec at Specification - Confluence Advanced Editor.
Storage FormatSome people have questioned whether this is a vendor lock-in play. It is not. The new storage format is based on XHTML with extension tags for Confluence specific functions. We've begun documenting it here so you can see exactly what is happening under the covers - to use in your plugins, remote applications, scripts, integrations etc. I think you'll agree this is pretty "standard stuff" and able to be understood by those who need to script it.
Why didn't we do this in the first place?When we shipped Confluence 4.0 we decided to not offer a source editor for a number of reasons. First of all, the new XHTML-based storage format is more complex than wiki markup so it's not as readable to the average user. Secondly, we wanted to protect less technical users from breaking their pages by accidentally deleting a closing tag or entering invalid HTML. This is why we're proposing that the source editing plugin is only enabled for your advanced users - and the storage format is not meant for day-to-day human editing. Just try it.Seriously, I encourage you to give the new editor a go. Listening to your feedback we've seen that many of you have not yet tried the new editor. We spent a lot of time thinking about what most people use wiki markup for - why people love it - and we determined that it was speed. Speed to be able to create content without picking up your mouse. So we've built many features and made design decisions with this in mind. If you haven't already, please give these editor features a try:
If you still feel that you just cannot live without wiki markup, there are many other wikis which have it as their lingua franca. We're happy to provide a list of other wiki solutions, although I assure you none are as feature rich or flexible as Confluence. We won't stop listeningAs I mentioned, we'd love your feedback on the following: And as per the original purpose of this page, we'd love your feedback on the editor itself and how we can improve it for you. Thank you to everyone who has contributed constructively so far. We see Confluence changing the way a company works and collaborates. That amazing change is why we come to work every day. Please help us make it a reality for you at your company. |