NOTE: This suggestion is for Confluence Server. Using Confluence Cloud? See the corresponding suggestion.

First, I'd like to apologise for not updating the status of this issue earlier. We have decided to close this issue as something we can't see ourselves doing in the foreseeable future, and I wanted to take a moment to explain why.

Confluence has gone on quite a journey since the early days as an enterprise wiki - we're always a little in awe of the many wonderful and varied ways Confluence is used. In the past few months, we've done a lot of soul searching about the future direction of Confluence. We've researched how our customers use Confluence today and identified ways we can better serve all Confluence users. We're determined to improve Confluence as platform for all teams, but have decided to concentrate our efforts specifically on helping teams collaborate on software and IT projects.

Global find and replace can be used in many situations, but we know the main requirement for this feature is for producing and publishing technical documentation. Focusing our development effort on helping software and IT teams collaborate means that this, and other features more typically found in help authoring and publishing tools, won't be making it onto our roadmap. This doesn't mean that Confluence is no longer a great platform for producing documentation and we hope many teams will continue to use Confluence to write and collaborate on their internal and external documentation.

We have a vibrant and growing ecosystem of add-on developers, some of which are already developing fantastic add-ons to extend Confluence for the world of technical documentation. In the spirit of openness and transparency, we wanted to clearly communicate that we won't be implementing global find and replace in the foreseeable future and are happy to offer up this feature for vendors in our ecosystem to implement. We have already begin working with some vendors to see what can be done in this space.

Cheers,
Sherif Mansour
Confluence Product Manager
sherif at atlassian dot com