Page Template Tips and Tricks

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Page templates are a great tool for helping content creators and content consumers navigate content. I personally find they’re very underutilized though. Many folks (myself included!) run into challenges using Templates, so I figured I’d share some tips and tricks I’ve found.

By no means is this an exhaustive list of useful things - so please let me know what I missed in the comments!

Search & Filter Templates

Confluence Cloud comes with ~140 “blueprints”, which are basically pre-loaded templates from Atlassian and partners. While this does give you a great starting point to get started, it is incredibly overwhelming. There is, however, a few ways you can filter and search through them. 

The search bar at the top (it’s VERY small from the sidebar menu!) lets you search via keyword. It goes through both the name of the template and the description. This helps you more easily find specific templates.

There’s a number of filters available as well. You can filter down by starred templates (more on this below!), “featured” templates, as well as various categories like Project Management.

Star Templates

Just like starring spaces and content, you can star templates. This doesn’t add it to the Starred menu in the sidebar, but rather adds it to the starred filter list in templates. This makes them MUCH easier to find and is worth a few minutes of searching and starring. Note that you can’t star templates for other people, so be sure to share your favorites!

“Featured” Templates

Space admins can “Promote” templates, which will put them on the “Featured” filter for everyone in that space. This is a different feature than starring, and is something the Space admin can do for everyone in the space. Space admins should be on the lookout for popular/useful templates, and team members should also be on the lookout for templates they like and share them with their space admins.

Find templates in other Spaces 

Templates are found in one, and only one, space (except Global templates… although those require a Confluence admin). This means you can “lose” a template when you swap spaces… unless you click the “space” drop down in the search. This will let you look for templates in different spaces (you just need to know WHICH space!).

Conclusion

Those are some tips and tricks around Templates! Which ones did I miss? Which ones do you think are useful? Comment below!