Page Template Tips and Tricks

[#1]

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!

[Stefan Kirchner]

A good approach is to create a dedicated Template Library, where each page template is stored as an empty page in a dedicated Confluence space.

Benefits of a Template Library

• Single source of truth
  All templates are maintained in one central location, making them easier to manage and keeping them consistent.
• Built-in versioning
  Since templates are stored as regular Confluence pages, they benefit from page version history. This is a significant advantage over the Template Editor, which does not preserve a complete change history.
• Central overview and easier maintenance
  Create an overview page listing all available templates. This provides a clear inventory and allows you to copy templates into different spaces while maintaining a single master version in the Template Library.
  In addition, I recommend maintaining the template version number in the 'Description field' of each template in the administration interface. This provides a quick and convenient way to keep track of template versions.

Things to Keep in Mind

• Template variables
  Some template variables can only be configured in the Template Editor. In these cases, create or update the template in the Template Editor first, and then copy the final version back into the Master Template Library to keep it up to date.
• Space-specific configurations
  The same applies to space-specific settings. Depending on the macros used, you may need to make minor adjustments after copying a template into another space.

Example: the macro 'Create from Template' needs a page template selection and the target space.

Page template version
Each page template can include the Content.properties (hidden) macro with two attributes:

• Template Name
• Template Version

The macro should be hidden from users. This makes it possible to generate reports later (e.g., using the Content Report Table macro) to identify which page templates - and which versions - are currently in use across your Confluence instance.

More (company) specific templates mean more value 

This means that you don't have >100 general templates (I've always disabled most of them in global or space template administration) but create company-specific and use case-specific templates instead.

I used this approach very often, work well.

Unfortunately, using Rovo with page templates is not yet good as we would like it to be. I've run several tests.

Goal: I would like to use a page template including the macro Content.properties, which enables me to define dedicated attributes (key/value)  that can be populated by Rovo.