The legacy content macro
The legacy content macro lets you keep incompatible legacy content on a cloud editor page. It supports a few of the macros and nested content configurations that aren’t available in the cloud editor.
What's the legacy editor?
The legacy editor was the original editing environment in Confluence, largely mirroring the Confluence server experience. Our cloud editor is now the default in Confluence and across Atlassian. While the legacy editor is no longer available for newly created pages, you can still view and edit older pages that were created in it. Pages migrated from Server or Data Center often land in Confluence Cloud in legacy format.
The legacy editor is in maintenance mode, meaning no new features are being implemented and we only fix bugs that are part of major incidents.
Conversion from the legacy editor to the cloud editor
You may have legacy editor pages if you have very old content or your organization migrated from Confluence Server or Data Center. These pages will still work, but they will have new features if you convert them to the cloud editor. The cloud editor offers new macros, an editing experience that looks like the published page, and features such as Atlassian Intelligence, collaborative editing, and smart links.
When you edit a page that was created in the legacy editor, you have the option to convert the page to the cloud editor. If you choose to convert, most of your content will move seamlessly to the cloud editor.
However, some legacy editor elements aren’t directly supported in the cloud editor. This content will be preserved inside the legacy content macro, which will be inserted into your page to contain the old elements. The conversion process will automatically place incompatible content inside one or more legacy content macros.
In this example, a legacy page was converted to the cloud editor.
During the conversion, this nested content was placed inside the legacy content macro. This allows the content to be edited and reconfigured without losing any data.
The reason this content wasn’t supported was the use of nested macros. (In this case, the Column macro is inside the Section macro and the Section macro is inside the Panel macro.)
This text (and only the text, not the entire element) can be copied from the legacy content macro to a table or layout outside the macro, delivering the intended visual design but taking advantage of the features of the cloud editor.
Working with the legacy content macro
Editing with the legacy content macro is similar but not identical to working in the legacy editor. Some macros may not work as expected because Confluence only provides support for the cloud editor.
You also will not be able to add your own legacy content macro into the cloud editor – it is only used by Confluence’s automatic page conversion process.
Collaborative editing: Because your new page is a cloud editor page, more than one person can edit it at the same time. However, using collaborative editing with the legacy content macro could cause unpredictable results, including loss of data. Make sure only one person is editing before you publish.
Undo the conversion to cloud editor
If you need to undo the conversion from the legacy editor to the cloud, you can restore a previous version of the page. Any changes made after the conversion will not be preserved. To restore an old version, select the More actions (…) menu, then Version history. Select the version before the comment “Version published after converting to the new editor” and select Restore.
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