Bring back wiki markup?
Asked by Bjorn Solberg:

Yes, the new editor is good, and better than the old one. However, my existing editor is already excellent for handling, navigating and editing text, especially when the text size increases past a few paragraphs. Therefore I am much more productive with my existing editor and always will be, no matter how many shortcuts and such you put in and I learn, until you have basically duplicated everything my current editor has. And I see no point in you doing that.

A more significant reason is that now I can't edit pages offline. Sure, I can type in markup and it will be converted when I put it in, but I won't be able to edit existing pages that way. That takes out a lot of opportunities and time during which I can write, further degrading my productivity. Also, given that there already is a workaround in wrapping my text in a non-renderable macro, thus enabling me to read and write the wiki markup, there is no reason not to make this an "official" feature that will appease the many (if not most) of us that prefer the wiki markup option.

Yet another reason is related to session timeouts. When this happens, say during a long meeting or other reason, for the most part Confluence is able to handle it and bring the content back after re-logging in. Sometimes, however, it fails, and it is frustrating to lose work and the wasted time it is typing it back in.

Will you bring back the wiki markup option as an official feature, or will we have to continue using the kludge to get aronud it? After all, it is still a wiki, or are you going to rebrand it as a CMS? ;)

Thanks,

Bjorn.


Answers:
author: Mike Naseef
body: Wow, Confluence wants to make sure the WIKI is for everyone, so they are making sure it only works for the least common denominator? That's a sad argument. I will be fighting tooth and nail to resist an upgrade to 4.0 at our organization while this feature is missing. Even when I do use the rich text editor, I find myself going back to the markup tab to fix the decisions the editor made. Maybe it will work better in 4, but why should I care? The markup page works great for me.

comments: author: Matt
body: Hey Mike -- we're currently building an Advanced Editor for Confluence 4.x that will allow you to edit the source of a page. You can [see the spec here](http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Specification+-+Confluence+Advanced+Editor).


author: Matt
body: Please see [Why We Removed the Wiki Markup Editor in Confluence 4.0](http://blogs.atlassian.com/2011/11/why-we-removed-wiki-markup-editor-in-confluence-4/) for further clarity on this decision.


author: Bjorn Solberg
body: I take that back - when the session times out during editing, I now get a spinning wheel and no way of logging back in short of closing and reopening the page, with all my edits lost. Argh...


author: Bjorn Solberg
body: Sorry for the duplicate post, I got an error message when I posted this yesterday and didn't see it on the question list later either. However, the link that the reply points to,

[https://answers.atlassian.com/questions/12073/wiki-markup-in-confluence-4-again](/questions/12073/wiki-markup-in-confluence-4-again)

but it fails to address any of my points above. Either way, consider this a "+1" for bringing wiki markup back. ;)

Thanks,

Bjorn.


Tags: markup

wiki