Please stop discriminating against blog posts

I've been actively using Confluence for the last 5 years, with peripheral exposure to Confluence admin for the last 2 years. In that time, I've developed a love/hate relationship with blog posts.

The love comes from the usefulness of this feature, i.e. managing date-oriented content separately from the page hierarchy. In addition to the usual blogging uses (i.e. individuals spouting their personal opinions on a variety of topics), blog posts are wonderfully useful to document any date-centric event, such as product release notes or meeting notes...and this is particularly true when coupled with an intelligent labelling strategy and the Blog Posts macro on a related page. Meeting Notes are especially handy to implement with blog posts, because doing them with pages would mean indefinitely adding items to an ever-growing page hierarchy (especially for daily or weekly meetings).

Sadly, the hate comes from how Atlassian continues to lag blog post capabilities behind page capabilities. Looking at CONF-234, I can see that blog posts have existed in Confluence since Release 1.0. However, every additional capability has been implemented later than the equivalent capability on pages (in some cases, much, much later!):

• CONF-1307: Add comments (fixed in Release 1.1)
• CONF-1712: Remote API support (fixed in Release 1.1)
• CONF-2025: Blog Attachments (fixed in Release 1.4)
• CONF-3768: Labels for blog posts (fixed in Release 2.0)
• CONF-1989: Blog version history (fixed in Release 2.1.5)
• CONF-6599: Display blog labels (fixed in Release 2.2.7)
• CONF-1576: Rename blog post (fixed in Release 2.6)
• CONF-12915: Change comment when editing blog post (fixed in Release 3.3)
• CONF-5307: Include macro supports blog posts (fixed in Release 3.5)
• CONF-5599: PDF Export support (fixed in Release 5.0)
• CONF-2455: Move blog post to another space (to be fixed in Release 5.5)

Today, blog posts still:

• can't have permissions set independently of the space permissions (unlike pages)
• can't be created using templates (or the newer Blueprints)
• in the most recent releases of Confluence, the date-based navigation features appear to have been removed
  • I used to be able to click through the blog a month at a time, with handy title-based links...now, I have to select Browse -> Blog in the header bar and scroll through months of blog posts at once (without any navigation links), or click the month in the header of an existing blog post to see that month's blog posts, with no way to move from month to month other than modifying the URL directly!

So, this "improvement" request is my plea for Atlassian to stop hating on blog posts. Blog posts have just as much utility as Pages, but they're continuously treated as second-class citizens of the Confluence feature set. Please, please, please bring some equality to Confluence!