Automation in Confluence: Tips & Best Practices

Confluence offers the user a lot of different automation features centered on organizing content, like labels, sub-pages, excerpts, page properties etc.

But these are only as good as the weakest link. If the user misspells or forgets a label, the page can no longer be easily accessed. Learn the Best Practices on how to avoid such situations.

If you’re creating a page properties macro list or want to keep the same standard to your knowledge base, it’s always good to use page templates instead of ever-creating new pages or copying it and adding labels manually.

Any Space admin can set up the templates and make it visible to the editors. Moreover, you can pre-set labels in the template, so when you create a new knowledge base article, it has all the necessary labels to work. No more human errors in this matter!

If you want to make sure that your editors will use the template, use the create from template macro to create a simple buttons for them. This rule is almost universal – the simpler you’ll make the content creation process, the more fool-proof it will be.

As said before, try to rely on the Page Tree instead of creating a tangled spiders’ web of links. This way you’ll be able to leave all the navigation to the automation-friendly tools such as Children Display. Also, every time you need to add something as a link manually, use the short link, so it won’t be affected when you change the page name.

Don’t rely on adding links manually to your pages. It will make your life difficult in the long run, as keeping everything up-to-date will become increasingly harder the more content you have in your Wiki. Instead of this, try using automatic macros like Children Display.

You can define level of the child pages that will be displayed on a page, and has an additional advantage – it forces you to keep your page structure clean and tidy.

This said, it’s far better to use the automatic links whenever available. This of course doesn’t apply to the web links at all, but when it comes to Confluence and Jira links, you always have an alternative. And why is it so important?

With Confluence links, they become essentially unbreakable no matter if you change the page’s name or move it anywhere. With Jira, the links are automatically created in the Jira issues and Confluence pages, which greatly helps with navigation afterwards.

Unfortunately, the basic Confluence setup can get you only so far. If you need any further automatization from Confluence, you can try one of the great Confluence apps available on the Atlassian Marketplace.

Scriptrunner for Confluence is a scripting solution that will allow you to do really a lot of different stuff, including automation of the content management process and changes to the application’s interface.

And if you want to automatize content security, we encourage you to try Secure Pages for Confluence!

Secure Pages is the All-In-One Solution for Restriction Management in Confluence. It brings new features to each Confluence space, including:

• Reusable restriction-sets called templates;
• Manual template application;
• Automatic template application for newly created pages;
• Restriction management delegated to space admins;
• Easy-to-configure automation rules;
• Template application when a condition (e.g. content type, label or author) is met;
• Conditions can be mixed and connected by ‘all’ or ‘any’ operator;
• Most common templates are marked as „Featured” on top of the list.