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Has the usability of Confluence and Jira improved over the years? Those were key products in use at ThoughtWorks when I was there about 4-6 years ago. I can tel
by obiefernandez 16y ago
Has the usability of Confluence and Jira improved over the years? Those were key products in use at ThoughtWorks when I was there about 4-6 years ago. I can tell you that most people hated working with them.
- goodside 16y agoA few months ago, I wanted to insert a double backslash into a Confluence wiki page. This isn't as odd as it sounds; Windows network file paths begin with \\Foo\. Since backslashes are of course an escape char, you usually have to use \\\\ to get \\ to output. But, in Confluence, this outputs two newlines. Yes, double-backslash is the symbol for a newline. Counter-intuitive, yes, but no worse than that so long as there's another symbol you can use for when you do need a double-backslash. But, the thing is, there isn't. When Confluence was first designed, they used up their only escape char with their nonstandard newline symbol. This is, their support staff informed me, a deep-rooted and unchangeable aspect of how Confluence works. It's not a bug, because it will never be changed. This should give you the gist of what Atlassian is like.
- i386 16y agoSorry you had a problem with Confluence. I can tell you that there is a project running right now to make the editor a lot nicer to work with. Not sure on the delivery schedule (I work on Bamboo so its not my product) but I believe it is on its way.
- brown9-2 16y agoIt might not help now, but I think you could have wrapped \\Foo\ with {noformat}\\Foo\{noformat}
- goodside 16y agoThis does not work. Nothing obvious will. This is an acknowledged issue that they are opting never to resolve. Here's a relevant issue on their bug tracker that has been open for four years: http://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-6405 http://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-6405 It wouldn't be nearly as infuriating if it weren't caused by such a terrible design decision (using doubled backslashes for line breaks when the backslash is your only escape char) in the first place.
- daredevildave 16y agoThey must have fixed something, because in our Confluence wiki: \\ -> new line \\\\ -> \\\\ \\Foo -> Foo \\Foo\Bar -> \\Foo\Bar Somewhat errant result for \\Foo, but the other ones seem to work.
- goodside 16y agoThe \\Foo\ example I gave was poorly chosen, because they put in a kluge fix so that anything that resembles a Windows file path will pass through unparsed. You cannot use \\ in any other circumstance, which is why \\Foo failed.
- wallflower 16y agoFor the amount of money it costs, Confluence's search is atrocious. Finding a document on Confluence can be an exercise in patience.
- squidsoup 16y agoConfluence is actually very reasonably priced compared to competing software like Jive SBS, Socialtext etc.
- nl 16y agoEver tried Sharepoint search? I actually wrote a Sharepoint spider to find a single document because of the stupidity of the default Sharepoint search (old version, but the biggest problem was that it relied on MS Word document metadata instead of document text)
- modoc 16y agoPersonally I love Confluence and Jira. I've brought them in to multiple companies replacing things like Wiki products, Bugzilla, Mantis, Trac, SharePoint, etc... and it's always been a step up. Are they perfect? No. But so far they're the best apps in the space I've ever used.