As stated here:

Open company, no bullshit

Q.E.D. - ... and I can confirm that this editor works as expected

Thank you
Scott, Mike, Jason and all the people in the background who helped that this editor come true

Contribute here to help to get the best of both worlds.

Sometimes it helps to raise your voice in a constructive way ... and be patient ...

Message from the founders of Atlassian:

We're building a source editor!
http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Confluence+4.0+Editor+-+Customer+Feedback

Oops! It looks like the Arsenal System Plugin will become a commercial plugin - I hope with fair pricing ...

To Arsenale Systems Team:

Thank you mates Will give it a try and will post first feedback here.

To John Masson:
Thx you pointing to this plugin!

AM

Arsenale's plugin meets my requirements.

Hi All:

Please stick to requirements and avoid the ranting.

1) Users don't intuitively understand Wiki. Training is a problem. Users do cry about this.
2) Wiki is not good, despite it having some convenient uses for a limited set of requirements. It had numerous limitations for which people such as ourselves have been complaining about for some time.

What we really have here is a conflict in target markets. Who is Atlassian trying to please? It's not dissimilar to a Unix vs Windows debate. There are points to both sides.

Most people do not want to write wiki. I say that from the perspective of a large company of many different types of people, not all who are technical, and many of which have much greater expectations. Wiki falls to pieces when you try to do things liked nested tables. There are a small set who love it and who will only give it up if it is wrung from their dead fingers.

The requirement of this story is not to bring back wiki as a primary format. The requirement of this story is the ability to have a back door to edit the underlying storage in the cases that the Confluence 4 editor fails or does not yet implement a particular feature. The Arsenale plugin looks to provide these capabilities on the surface and their proposed pricing looks quite reasonable. I've already sent it to our team to review as an option for when we do cut over to Confluence 4.

I am satisfied with the resolution of this story.

If you want to open another story that is about "bring back wiki" - go ahead. But if I had a down vote for it, I would place such a vote. Wiki is practical to a point for a certain type of user. If your whole shop is this type of user, you will be disappointed with the rest of the world moving on.

@John Masson

That is in my opinion shameful. Not only will we have to pay for a solution to a feature that should just be included.
But it also incorporates a crappy workflow towards the issues most people would properly use it for in the future...

Two things seems to shine though in Atlassians minds.

• We will use it for writing entire pages with.
• We are too incompetent to understand that if we mess with the source, errors is on our own account.

Neither are true anymore... I Can't begin to imagine who would write entire pages in the storage format, if they can that is fine but I think the more common use case will be:

Fixing broken parts of the page (markup errors)... Your beloved WYSIWYG Editor is full of bugs, especially when it comes to corner cases, but more common things can fuck up as well. We need the source editor to be able to fix these things WHEN you beloved WYSIWYG Editor fucks so much up that you can no longer fix the issue unless you delete that entire paragraph and start over...

This is why I can't see the plugin here as a fix... Using this you impose a workflow that requires you to perform these steps:

1. Save the page with the bugs. (Generating a broken revision, screwing things up for people just reading the page)
2. Open Source Editor (Plugin)
3. Fix Issues
4. Save the page. (Generating an additional revision)
5. Open the page in the normal RTE.
6. Continue editing.

It should be:

1. Switch to Source Edit. (No new revision, Users can still read the page as it was before you started editing).
2. Fix Issues.
3. Return to RTE Edit. (No new revision)

Secondly, I still don't get the attitude: "I'd recommend restricting this as much as possible to save yourselves headaches as admins"... Seriously, STOP IT!... You could screw things up majorly back when we had the WIKI syntax, but people didn't come crying to the admins then, why should they now?... People KNOW that if they begin to edit something they don't fully understand, it has a certain risk to it... Stop speaking of your users as if think they where Monkeys... (Unless the majority of your revenue actually comes from ZOO's)

Ever done this:

Some code
{_code}

Ups I messed up the code closing tag, and here I have a huge mess of tables, sections, diagrams, columns and what the fuck not..

And finaly I have another code block which ends up fucking over the whole page.

//NOTE extra code ending to keep this comment in order.

This is just ONE way of fucking things up in the old markup, no one cried about that... The new markup is more complex, sure, that just means a higher learning curve... But people who can't write HTML, XHTML, XML, CML... They usually tends to keep away from it... All without anyone telling them to... I would bet you that Enabling such an editor in an organisation would generate no more issues than the WYSIWYG it self would... It might even remove some of the complaints about the WYSIWYG...

As a Developer my self, I only find my self thinking as you do here when I have mistrust in my applications ability to function in a stable fashion under the circumstance...
Is that the case?... Do you think Confluence could be caused to crash in certain cases with this feature?... Would it cause loss of data?... If that was the case, you should not be able to edit the source at all by no means... (Unless you go directly into the Database, breaking all rules)...

If the only risk is that pages would render incorrectly or not at all... Then stop being so damn scared... People are adults... People will know the risks...

Hi Atlassian, I'm very disappointed with the new editor. I bought Confluence thinking it's a professional wiki application (what implies a markup editor) and I were shocked not to be able to edit my pages in a markup editor!

Thumbs down!

(The plugin is no alternative. If i've wanted to write xhtml, I wouldn't need a wiki!)

Hi All,

A vendor, Arsenale, have created a plugin called Invisible Ink which gives you the ability to edit the Storage Format for a page.

It allows you to configure which groups have access to use it which I'd recommend restricting this as much as possible to save yourselves headaches as admins.

You can get it here on PAC: https://plugins.atlassian.com/plugin/details/918877

Since this covers off the functionality requested in this issue I'll close it off.

Thanks,
John