Publishing/Bulk Updating Existing Pages without Breakage

[Darryl Lee]

Scenario

Every now and again, a team decides they need to completely revamp content on anywhere from 5-50 pages.

To be able to collaborate, they copy these 5-50 pages to a personal or staging space, and get them updated just the way they want.

Question

How do they "push" or "publish" these updated pages back to the original space?

I kind of feel like to minimize bad impacts on users, we have to do a bunch of manual work.

The concern is that we don't want any bookmarks/links from old emails to lead to restricted or deleted pages, but instead to the updated content.

Option 1 - Move and Copy

• Move old pages to restricted space for backup
• Copy new pages to "published" space

Problem

• If users have personal bookmarks or click on old links in emails, those links will now lead to "This page is restricted" messages where users will inevitably click on "Request access" 

Option 2 - Copy and Delete and Copy

• Copy old pages to restricted space for backup
• Delete old pages
• Copy new pages to "published" space

Problem

• If users have personal bookmarks or click on old links in emails, those links will now lead to the "We couldn't find what you're looking for" message, and unfortunately it doesn't seem like it auto-suggests the correct page.

Option 3 - Copy and then Manually Edit

• Copy old pages to restricted space for backup
• Edit each page individually
• Copy/paste new content to each page in "published" space

Problem

• As number of pages increases, this can be an incredibly time-consuming effort.

Option 4 - Buy an app

If this was a formally "published" space where this kind of work happens regularly, sure you'd want to look at an app like Comala Publishing or Space Sync or Scroll Documents. But that's not exactly this use case, and certainly not worth the spend as well as the overhead in setting it up.

But I guess since we're talking about them - can users/vendors confirm that their tools would handle the updates WITHOUT changing the pageIds? That's the key thing to avoiding the breakage I'm worried about in Options 1 and 2.

Option 5 - Am I missing anything?

The whole reason I'm posting this here is because this is an actual real-world problem and I'm curious if anybody has any other ideas as opposed to Option 3 or 4.

And yes, I LOVE Automations, so sure it'd be interesting to try to create my own syncing solution, but again, that's more of an Option 4 thing than what we're trying to do.

[Kristian Klima]

Hi @Darryl Lee 

I'm not a vendor but I can confirm that after you establish a syncing relationship between two spaces (or more spaces with Space Sync), Comala Publishing and Space Sync will preserve page IDs in both spaces.

The relationship is based on matching (pairing) two specific pages from two spaces. In fact, break that bond and the syncing breaks.

(I'm using both apps, btw).

Crucially, both apps will 'transpose' links upon syncing, so if you link Page A to Page B in your source space, then sync the pages to the target space, Page A Target will link to Page B Target.

With both apps, you MUST have a permanent bond established between two permanent spaces, one of which is SOURCE, the other is the TARGET. You do all the editing in Source, Target is for consumption only.

This greatly reduces dependencies. Creating those ad-hoc chunks for 50 pages to edit is not how these apps work. Which is a good thing. You can literally update/publish/sync, whatever you call it, any page at any time.

There is one other option that closely resembles your current scenario, and it's Breeze by B1nary.

It turns the concept of 2 spaces around. You have one GOOD space. You have also another space link to it - literally a working space - which does not have to be permanently populated with all the pages' pendants.

You need to edit a page, you simply create its copy in the working space, do your editing, then merge the copy back. The app has a workflow and approvals built in.

I tested the app extensively and I quite liked the concept.

On a side note, Space Sync works great with Pages Manager (a free app by Ricksoft) and you can trigger automatic sync by mass changing status of selected pages.

Edit: Workflows for Confluence by Appfox is a predominantely workflow app but also supports space sync as a final part of the workflow.

[Darryl Lee]

Thanks @Kristian Klima - yeah, the thing with my scenario is it really isn't a "Publish" situation.

It's something that happens maybe...3-4 times a year, but with different teams, and different spaces. 

Once the revamp/refresh/updates of the pages/space is done, it usually then just works like regular pages, where people make one-off edits "live" on the pages without need for approvals/workflows/etc.

I supposed the functionality I'm looking for would be similar to how Confluence deals with Attachments.

When you upload an attachment with the same name, it "automatically" versions it, but (somewhere, hopefully) there is an attachment ID that doesn't change?

Well, at least if you're embedding the attachment inside of a page, the embed shows the latest version of the attachment. 

I'd kind of like that, but for pages.

I'm wondering if this is really that weird of a scenario. Like I said - it comes up at my job every couple of months.

[Yulia Lenina _AppFox_]

@Darryl Lee we at AppFox develop Workflows for Confluence app, which transforms Confluence into a robust Document Management system with multi-stage approval processes and cross-space publishing. And I can confirm that our app doesn't change the IDs, so if your users bookmarked the page, they will see this page even if it was updated afterwards. 

I understand that your case might not require the whole workflow/approval app, but if you ever consider building approval process for your teams in more scale, I would encourage you to look at our app too:)

@Kristian Klima thanks for mentioning our app too!