Want to chat to the PM responsible for cloud editor extensibility? These are my details. Let's chat!

Hey awesome Ecosystem peeps! My name is Jonno and I’m the Product Manager (PM) on the new cloud editor - recently rolled out to Confluence, and in the process of being rolled out to Jira, Bitbucket, etc. One of my core focus areas is editor extensibility. It’s something we’re currently putting a lot of effort into improving both from a UX perspective, but also for developers building on top of the editor.

As we continue to work towards providing an awesome dev experience for all of you to build increasing value for your customers, I’d love to have an open line of communications with the Ecosystem. That said, my door is open for anyone to email or jump on a call with me. I’m super keen to understand your needs, pain points, and help answer any questions you may have.

To get in touch you can:

Looking forward to getting to know y’all better :slightly_smiling_face:

Jonno

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Welcome @JonnoKatahanas!

In general, I’d like to see more emphasis on continuity of experience: both for users and for vendors who extend Confluence for said users.

Most of the problems that our customers complain about are due to some behavior that they only see in Cloud or only see with the new editor… and they are things that we, the app/plugin developer can’t fix or work around.

For example, my company develops some rich-text macros. Nesting of rich-text macros is not supported in the new editor. Here is a related bug: CONFCLOUD-58656… about no longer supporting nesting tables.

Here’s another big one for us: CONFCLOUD-69625 : we need a way to tell the difference between old and new pages and a way to style content using whatever style Confluence is using (old/new). There is a workaround in that bug, we will see how that works for our apps, but issues like this should be one of the first things to come to mind when releasing a new editing experience (how to enable users and vendors to do what they have done before).

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Hey @TureHoefner! Thanks for the comment.

For nested rich text macros and tables, the following is why we don’t allow it. Our old editor provided heaps of flexibility. You could pretty much do anything with it. Rich text macro and table nesting are examples of this flexibility. This flexibility, however, caused a heap of reliability challenges. Because you could nest so many nodes inside other nodes, with no restrictions, it was almost impossible to get effective test coverage; there were just way too many permutations. It caused a whole host of maintenance challenges, to the point where making one update to a new release almost a year of work for a full team. Many times, it made it extremely difficult to understand what was causing a bug to exist. This is why most editors on the market are very restrictive in what you can/can’t do.

As we moved towards the new editor, we had to make a realistic call between having a super rock solid editor from a reliability POV, that we could regularly update with new features for our vendors and end customers, or shipping something that you could pretty much do anything in but could never guarantee a reliable experience. We chose to take the route of making it as flexible as possible, whilst still being able to maintain reliability. We had to find a happy medium. For us, we tried to find a good balance where we still provided flexibility, just not to the same extent as the old editor where reliability became an issue. Our thinking here is that regardless of how many features we can ship, providing an unreliable experience for both our vendors and end customers isn’t acceptable. We want to ensure the experiences both we and our vendors ship is rock solid. Reliability internally is always our number one priority.

We understand that this new world causes challenges (e.g. apps that utilize nesting of macros). We’re actively trying to understand all these challenges and find effective ways to work around them. This is why talking to vendors like you is super important. If you want to discuss this in more detail, I’d love to jump on a call Calendly - Jonno Katahanas

Re; [CONFCLOUD-69625] Connect context parameters that tell us which editor (legacy, fabric, etc.) was used to compose the page - Create and track feature requests for Atlassian products., thanks for raising. I’ve shared internally and will discuss with relevant people.

Hope this helps.

Jonno

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