UPDATE: May 2013

Since this page was published back in November 2011 there have been two plugins released on the Atlassian Marketplace that provide source and wiki markup editing capabilities in Confluence 4.x.

Source Editor for Confluence 4.x

Compatible with Confluence 4.1.5 and above, the Confluence Source Editor is a free plugin, developed and supported by Atlassian, that allows users to view and edit the underlying storage format for a Confluence page.

Wiki Plugin for Confluence

Bob Swift’s Wiki Plugin for Confluence 4.0 and above allows entry and editing of wiki markup inside a wiki-markup macro in Confluence pages.

In September 2011 we released Confluence 4.0. Underpinning the new functionality it included was a change to the way Confluence stored its pages, moving from wiki markup to a higher fidelity storage format. You can read more about this decision here – Why We Removed the Wiki Markup Editor in Confluence 4.0.

For the overwhelming majority of customers, this was a huge, huge win. An end to the inherent problems of having two editors and the ability for us to deliver features people had long asked for. We did our best to make wiki markup gurus comfortable as well, with a number of features designed to make the new editor faster than wiki markup:

  • Autoformatting of Wiki Markup
  • Autocomplete for Links, Media, and Macros
     
  • Autoconvert for Pasted Links
     

For a small number of users though, this never mattered – like users working within a small, purely technical team who don't:

  • collaborate with other less technical teams like marketing, sales and product management
  • require dedicated vendor support
  • rely upon the various add-ons available on the Atlassian Plugin Exchange
  • need a wiki that provides structure through page hierarchies
  • require enterprise-grade security, permissions and native LDAP integration
  • need deep JIRA integration

We hate losing customers – it upsets us. We still think we make the best enterprise wiki available today, but if wiki markup syntax is generally more useful to you than Confluence's extensive set of add-ons, structured page hierarchies, robust security and permissions, JIRA integration, and an editor anyone can use, we genuinely think you should try an alternative.

In the spirit of being an open company, here's a list of the more popular wikis that provide a markup editor. 

Wikipedia has a more exhaustive list here. Feel free to comment on this page if you know of other solutions.

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8 Comments

  1. Anonymous

    Mar 02, 2012

    XWiki also looks like a viable alternative:

     

    1. Anonymous

      Mar 02, 2012

      Don't do it!  I am landed with XWiki at my current client.  The markup language is OK but moving inexorably to XML.  The WYSIWYG inserts great chunks of XML into your document, rendering it unusable for 'human' editors.  In an effort to gain more of the non-technical user base for content management, these Wiki products are becoming non-Wikis.   But AFAIK 'purist' wikis like Twiki will always remain so.

      1. Jean-Vincent Drean

        Mar 20, 2012

        Since the XWiki syntax can handle almost any html markup it's true that copy/pasting in the WYSIWYG can leave you with nasty chunks of wiki syntax, but it's not XML. It's a generic parameters mechanism extending the wiki syntax to the point where any html snippet can be converted to wiki syntax.

        All the teams dealing with wiki syntax + WYSIWYG had a lot of issues with conversion, Confluence focused on the WYSIWYG editor, XWiki developed a syntax flexible enough to allow bidirectional XHTML/wiki syntax conversions.

        TL;DR: XWiki deserves to be put in the 'purist' list, in my humble XWiki committer opinion (smile)

  2. Anonymous

    Aug 08, 2012

    "We still think we make the best enterprise wiki..."

    No, now you make an enterprise documentation system.  It's no longer a Wiki. 

     

     

    1. Anonymous

      Sept 04, 2012

      The above is correct. Confluence is an RTE now, not a wiki.

    2. adamnoffie

      Feb 19, 2013

      From Wikipedia's article on Wiki:

      A wiki is a website which allows its users to add, modify, or delete its content via a web browser usually using a simplified markup language or a rich-text editor.[1][2][3] Wikis are powered by wiki software. Most are created collaboratively.

      Notice that it says "usually", and has "or a rich-text editor."  Nobody ever said a wiki had to have a special wiki syntax.

       

      1. Anonymous

        May 14, 2013

        That is unless,....it's exactly what the customers want from a software product.

        If they don't get want they want,...they voice their opinion,....wait to see if there's a response,...and then find another product that suits their need.

  3. Anonymous

    Sept 19, 2012

    What a snobbish answer.

    Guess what? I do:

    • collaborate with other less technical teams like marketing, sales and product management
    • require dedicated vendor support
    • rely upon the various add-ons available on the Atlassian Plugin Exchange
    • need a wiki that provides structure through page hierarchies
    • require enterprise-grade security, permissions and native LDAP integration
    • need deep JIRA integration

    And Confluence 3.x had all that.  You guys have a serious chip on your shoulder.  Just because some of us are power-users who took the time to learn a markup language and don't appreciate having to deal with invisible formatting or confusing decisions made by the RTE as we struggle to get text to look the way we want it, doesn't mean that we don't need or do the above things.

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