2 posts tagged with "storage-format"

Every Confluence page has two faces: the one you see in the editor, and the one the database sees. The database face is the storage format — an XHTML document with macros as tags — and before it, Confluence stored pages as wiki markup: h1. headings, *bold text*, {code} blocks. People still search for wiki markup because half the internet's Confluence advice, every migration script, and a lot of content written before ~2017 speaks that language. And in 2026 the topic got urgent: Atlassian is retiring the legacy editor (full deprecation April 2026), and the new cloud editor dropped the Markup macro entirely. Here's how to view, edit, and convert what's actually stored — with or without admin rights.

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.