One frequent complaint heard from confluence users is that information is hard to find. This often happens because while confluence spaces often start out well organized over time as pages are added in a haphazard way the space becomes disorganized, and it is hard 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, the 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. Each node within the tree can be configured to sort its child pages alphabetically or in a user defined order.
Be Careful
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\}
Searching within a page tree
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.