Confluence 5.0 has reached end of life
Check out the [latest version] of the documentation
1.0 for this plugin is now available (3/Apr) on the plugin exchange under the name Confluence Source Editor.
Fixed:
- Support for using the source editor in comments.
Beta 2 included enhancements include support for:
- Find and replace within the page
- Restricting access to the Source Editor to particular user groups.
We welcome your feedback - please file issues in the JIRA project at https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/SOURCE
- This is a draft of the "Source Editor" specificiation for Confluence.
- Please see Feedback on Confluence Storage Format for an overview of Confluence's storage format.
Background and strategic fit
Up until now, we haven't allowed users to edit the underlying editor storage format (though this was easy for anyone to hack, using Firebug). As customers upgrade to Confluence 4.0, we're learning there are three main reasons people want source access:
1. Customers Feel "Locked-in"
With the switch from wiki markup to the new XHTML-based storage format, and because people were no longer able to edit a text-based version of their page directly, they felt they were locked into Confluence. While you could always still get your content out via the API or through WebDAV but people wanted to be able to see it directly.
2. Fixing Formatting Niggles
When a user hits an occasional bug, he or she wants a quick workaround. Over the years we trained everyone on this - what do you do when you hit a bug in the RTE? Switch to wiki markup. This wasn't really acceptable then and definitely isn't now, but some customers are asking for it... "give me access to the source so I can quickly fix something that's gone wrong."
3. Offline content editing
Some users want to copy the source of their page out of Confluence to work with it in other ways, whether it be updating content offline, sharing with others via email, or using a preferred text editor for things like bulk changing of link properties. Use cases include:
- Bulk edit link properties
- Bulk edit macro properties
- Confluence offline editing
- Editing via preferred editor (emacs, textmate, etc)
Requirements
UX
- Expecting an icon to the left of help in the toolbar that will pop up a dialog when enabled for a user.
Supportability
- This will be implemented as a separate plugin that can be installed by a Confluence site administrator.
- The plugin will be maintained by Atlassian.
Notes
We refer to the Confluence storage format as 'XHTML-based'. To be correct, we should call it XML, because the Confluence storage format does not comply with the XHTML definition. In particular, Confluence includes custom elements for macros and more. We're using the term 'XHTML-based' to indicate that there is a large proportion of HTML in the storage format.