One frequent complaint heard from confluence users is that information in confluence can be hard to find. While confluence spaces often start out well organized – over time as pages are added the space becomes disorganized, and it is hard for user to distinguish up-to-date content from obsolete information.

Confluence has always had the ability to organize pages hierarchically, when new pages are created they are by default made children of the current page. In the past the page hierarchy was hard to exploit in any useful way, and re-organizing the pages was difficult. Several new features in confluence 2.10, recently installed at SLAC, make this task easier. In particular

  • It is now possible to move pages around within the page hierarchy using drag-and-drop directly from your web browser. You can do this without breaking links to existing pages.
  • It is possible to embed a dynamic view of the page hierarchy anywhere in your confluence pages which can be a very useful tool to allow users to explore the information available.
  • It is possible to create search boxes which search within a specific hierarchy of pages.

Each of these features is explained in more detail below.

Moving pages using drag-and-drop

From within any confluence space you can see the complete page tree by selecting Browse, Pages from the menu at the top of the page, then select View: Tree.

Within the tree it is now possible to simply drag pages from one location to another. You can drag individual pages, or a whole sub-tree of pages in one operation. Moving pages in this way will not break links to existing pages, since the URL's of the pages do not change. By default each page sorts its children alphabetically, but you can set an explicit page order by dragging and dropping pages. In the image above the Confluence folder has been configured to not sort its pages alphabetically, clicking on the icon beside the page will re-sort its children alphabetically.

(warning) It is perhaps advisable to try this on your personal confluence space first, before tackling a larger space. It is easy to accidentally drop a whole set of pages in some obscure location but once you get used to it moving pages becomes fast and easy.

Inserting a page tree in your own pages

The {pagetree} macro can be used to insert a navigation page into any confluence page. This can be a convenient way to allow users to explore the organization of pages within the space. The {pagetree} macro can be configured to display the entire page hierarchy for the space or a subset of the tree starting at any specific page. The following example is created using

{pagetree:root=Confluence}

Note that you can click on the + beside the top level pages below to see the children of particular pages.

Searching within a page tree

The {pagetree} can be used to also display a search box which searches only within the specified tree of pages. Alternatively the {pagetreesearch} macro can be used to display the search box without the tree. For example

{pagetreesearch:rootPage=Confluence}

displays

or

{pagetree:root=Confluence|searchBox=true}

displays

More information

A fuller description of the features described here can be found in the Atlassian Confluence documentation. Documentation on the {pagetree} and {pagetreesearch} macros can be found in the Confluence Content section of the Confluence Notation Guide.