9 posts tagged with "developer-tools"

The diagrams live in the repository. They were written in Mermaid, they are reviewed in pull requests next to the code they describe, and they are correct as of the last commit. The documentation, however, lives in Confluence — because that is where the rest of the team reads it. So somebody copies a Markdown file across, pastes it into a Confluence page, and the flowcharts, sequence diagrams and ER models arrive as grey boxes of unrendered code.

Everyone has hit this. It is one of the most common Confluence complaints, and the usual workarounds are worse than the problem: export every diagram to PNG and re-upload them (now they rot), keep the diagrams in an external tool and paste links (readers need a second account, and the links break), or build a browser extension to force rendering on paste.

There is a better answer, and Mermaid 12 makes it better still.

Every team has Markdown lying around that Confluence needs: the README that became the service doc, the design doc drafted as a pull-request description, the runbook that lives in the repo. And every attempt to move it hits the same wall — Confluence's default editor does not parse Markdown. Paste a .md document and you get a wall of pipes, backticks, and asterisks that looks exactly like what it is: text nobody formatted.

The macro route dissolves the wall. Paste the document into a Markdown macro that actually parses it, watch it render in the preview pane, publish. This page is the workflow, end to end.

Every engineering page in Confluence eventually holds code — a curl from the runbook, the config that fixed the incident, the query the dashboard runs. And every one of those snippets has three natural enemies: the language dropdown in the macro dialog, the paste that loses its indentation, and the reader who cannot copy the thing without dragging across line numbers.

Markdown fences solve all three, because they make the code block text you type instead of an object you configure. ```bash, paste, ``` — done, highlighted, copyable. This guide shows the syntax, the theming behavior, and when fences beat the native macro.

Half the debugging in a Jira-integrated stack ends at the same place: a wall of braces. A webhook payload pasted into a comment, a config blob in a custom field, entity properties an integration app quietly wrote onto the ticket — the JSON is there, on the issue, but reading it means scrolling and counting brackets. Here are three ways to actually read it, from free-but-painful to a proper graph view inside Jira.

Most Confluence users never see it, but every page is stored as an XML document in Confluence's storage format — a specific XHTML dialect with custom tags for macros, layouts, and embeddings. The visual editor hides this. But sometimes the only way to fix a problem is to edit that XML directly: a macro is corrupted and won't render, a copy-paste introduced broken formatting, or you need to find-and-replace a URL across a long page that the visual editor can't reach.

Confluence exposes the storage format through its REST API, but there's no built-in visual editor for it. Raw Storage Source Editor for Confluence adds one — a Monaco-powered editor that opens the raw storage XML of any page, with format, find-and-replace, and (in the Pro edition) a diff view. This guide covers when and how to use it safely.

The scenario every technical team hits: your engineering docs live in Markdown — READMEs, API references, design docs — and they contain diagrams (Mermaid), equations (LaTeX), and code samples. You paste that Markdown into Confluence, and it falls apart. The Mermaid code blocks render as plain text. The LaTeX equations show as raw $...$ syntax. The code blocks lose their syntax highlighting. Confluence's native editor is WYSIWYG, not Markdown, and the import tools treat Markdown as a one-time conversion rather than something you edit live.

Enhanced Markdown for Confluence solves this with a Markdown editor that renders everything inline — Mermaid diagrams, KaTeX and LaTeX math, syntax-highlighted code, and GitHub-flavored tables — with a live split preview. It runs on the Quikdown engine, so all rendering libraries are bundled locally (no external CDN dependencies, which matters for "Runs on Atlassian" compliance). This guide walks through writing Markdown in Confluence with diagrams, math, and code all rendering live.

Developer teams use Confluence differently than marketing or HR. You document APIs, share architecture diagrams, write runbooks, and collaborate on code reviews. The default Confluence editor works, but it wasn't built for technical documentation.

This guide covers the best Confluence apps for developers in 2026, organized by use case. We built several of these apps at NGPILOT, so we'll be transparent about where our apps fit and where competitors offer better solutions.

Confluence stores every page as XML in a format called "Confluence storage format." Most users never see it. But if you have ever tried to fix a broken macro, remove hidden formatting artifacts, or bulk-edit repetitive markup, you know the rich text editor alone is not enough. You need direct access to the underlying source.

At NGPILOT, we built two apps for exactly this purpose: Raw Storage Source Editor for Confluence (free) and Raw Storage Source Editor Pro for Confluence (paid). Both let you open, view, and edit the raw XML behind any Confluence page. This post compares them feature by feature so you can pick the right one for your team.

Confluence code block themes let you customize how code appears in your documentation. The built-in code macro offers limited theme support, but third-party apps bring dark mode, syntax highlighting, and VS Code-like editing to Confluence.

This guide compares the best Confluence code block apps for syntax highlighting, including Modern Code Blocks, Better Code Macro, and Prism Syntax Highlighter. Learn which one fits your team's needs for Confluence code block themes, language support, and developer experience.