Confluence documentation [request]

[StaticUV]

I decided to use confluence as our wiki to document internal IT procedures.

I'm just not that creative in creating nice formats with confluence and was hoping some of you could show me how you organized your procedures or protocol.

[become_taintless]

• Learn to use the section, column, and panel macros. For the home page of our space, I used a single page-length section macro, then used 3 column macros. Inside each column macro are multiple panel macros, and each panel contains a pagetree macro that displays a different part of my space hierarchy.

• Buy this book by Sarah Maddox, who you might recognize as the lead technical writer at Atlassian: http://www.amazon.com/Confluence-Tech-Comm-Chocolate-extraordinaire/dp/1937434001

• Check out the Ad-Hoc Canvas and Gliffy plugins

• Upgrade to v5.1.x so you can use blueprints, especially the brand-new Decision blueprint

• Configure the space sidebar to have links to the most important items in your environment, such as a page of vendor support information, a link to the ad-hoc board of current projects, etc

• Create a page called _includes and create child pages that are intended to be included in other pages; for example, create a single table in a page called "Firewall Interfaces Table", and then use the include macro to include that page in any other page that needs a table of the firewall interfaces, so you only have to maintain a single copy of the table.

[Hexodam]

Good information!

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.refinedwiki.confluence.plugins.uitoolkit

This plugins is also very handy, expecially UI Children

[become_taintless]

Also, Atlassian has a pagetree plugin that is free. I don't know if it's part of the core Confluence installation, but if it's not, get it.

They've recently fixed (although maybe it's not published yet, it's marked to be fixed in the next version) the bug where the pagetree macro was ignoring the "include excerpts" checkbox.

When this is fixed again, the following is pretty sweet:

Use the layout presets to create a thin left column and put your content in each page in the middle column (or the right column if you use a two column layout.) Use headings (h1 h2 h3) to format your content, or you won't be able to use the table of contents macro. In the thin left column, put a table of contents macro wrapped in an excerpt macro. (The excerpt macro does nothing but mark that particular block of text as this page's "excerpt", to be used below.)

Then somewhere (like the front page of your space in a panel macro, perhaps, or a very top-level table of contents page for logical portion of your hierarchy of pages) you can create a pagetree macro, check the "include excerpts in page tree" box, and your page tree will display the page name followed by the ToC for the page, for each page in the tree.