Calling for beta testing important technical update to the new navigation in Confluence

Confluence Development Confluence Cloud Announcements
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Hi community,

I’m Elaine, Confluence Product Manager currently managing the rollout of the new navigation. I want to share an important technical update to the new nav and ask for your help to beta test it.

The new layout manager is coming to Confluence

As you may know, we have been gradually rolling out the new navigation to Confluence customers since December 2019. The new experience has shown significant positive customer impact. We expect to reach 100% of customers by end of May.

Meanwhile, we’ve been working on page-layout , a whole new way to lay out a page, user generated or system rendered, on top of the new navigation. The main goal is to optimize for performance/speed.

The following illustration helps explain the difference between the old and new layout manager.

Old layout manager

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image1754×884 137 KB

New layout manager

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image1756×886 148 KB

When is the new layout manager in Confluence rolling out?

Here’s our timeline:

  • May 7: Released to Ecosystem Beta Group. Sign up here if you haven’t.
  • Week of May 11: Roll out to a small percentage of Confluence sites
  • Beyond that until mid June: gradually roll out to the rest of Confluence customers

What does this change mean to you as part of the Confluence ecosystem?

We need your help to beta test this change.

  • This is an underlying architectural change that should have no impact on the user experience in Confluence nor your existing integration with Confluence. Performance gain is expected.
  • Page layout change of this magnitude does touch wide surface area, potentially causing issues with page content positioning, z-index clashes, and sidebar state. Things to watch out for include any changes to the behavior or presentation of side nav links, as well as anything that calculates page width or height such as banners, scroll behavior, popups, etc.

The Confluence team has been testing the new layout manager carefully to address any such potential side effects. Now we need your help to try it out with your apps so that we can work together to ensure a solid update when it reaches production customer sites.

Plan for known issues

We’ve identified a couple of issues with this technical update. They result in horizontal scroll showing up when an app utilities the entire page content area (as illustrated in the architectural comparison). This could leave little to no right margin for the affected app experience and potentially cut off some pixels of clickable visual elements provided by the app.
We’ll be fixing issues like this before releasing this technical update to production customers. Stay tuned.

Have a question? Need to report an issue?

Please comment in this post directly, or open a support ticket with mention of “ecosystem beta test of new Confluence layout manager”. We’ll follow up accordingly.

Thank you all, and stay safe and healthy!

5 Likes
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Hi @ElaineH,
is there any difference to the ‘new navigation’ roll-out that has been happening to developer (and possibly ‘production’) instances since half a year or so?
I am just asking as you mention:

Week of May 4: Release to Ecosystem Beta Group

but I have instances I use for development and testing that have the old navigation and others that have the new navigation.
Any reason for me to retest again or are the instances with the new navigation (as of now) identical for what’s rolling out now?
Cheers, Chris

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+1 to what @christoffer said

I’ve seen the new navigation on several production instances already as well and are also wondering what the difference is. Nevertheless, thanks for posting this here! :slight_smile:

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@christoffer, this is an underlying technical change on top of the new navigation. We are releasing this updated version to ecosystem beta test sites first. Basically, we have two versions of the new navigation:

Version 3.1: the new navigation experience with the OLD layout manager.

  • It’s at a later stage of progressive rollout. Will reach 95% of Confluence customers this week and 100% in the last week of May.
  • If you have enrolled any Confluence test instance in our Ecosystem Beta Group, it should’ve been on Version 3.1 since late January.

Version 3.2: the new navigation experience with the NEW layout manager.

  • Instances enrolled in Ecosystem Beta Group will be upgraded to Version 3.2 this week, before any Confluence customer does. This is the beta testing discussed here.
  • A small percentage of Confluence customers already on the new nav Version 3.1 will receive this version update next week.
  • We’ll gradually bump the remaining customers to Version 3.2 until mid June.

It’s important to do regression testing on Version 3.2 even if it doesn’t change the UI nor APIs you integrate with. Please check out the section " What does this change mean to you as part of the Confluence ecosystem?" for more details.

It seems you have some test instances enrolled in Ecosystem Beta Group and the others not. In this case, only the instances enrolled in Ecosystem Beta will receive the version update this week. The rest will be treated as regular customer instance that will receive Version 3.2 later.

Pro tip: You can check to see if data-testid="grid-topNav" exists in the DOM. If it does the instance is on new layout, if not the instance is on old layout.

Hope this helps. Please let me know if you have further questions. Thank you.

3 Likes
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please see my reply to Chris

1 Like
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Thanks for explaining the difference @ElaineH! Makes sense! :slight_smile:

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Related to this, are you making changes to the content (page / blogpost) menus?
My development Confluence Cloud instance has a new menu layout and it has broken my app’s custom menu items. They all simply fall through to JIRA.

1 Like
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Did you mean the side navigation in any Confluence space where the page tree and blog tree are?

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I was talking about that issue with the overflow menu elsewhere… so don’t worry about this question now!