Creating a process library with searchable and filterable TOC

Nicki Schermann

Hello! I'm creating a process library and am seeking best practice setup ideas. Ideally what it would look like is this:

• On the front page, a table of contents that is automatically populated when a new page (i.e. process) is added. This should include tags and last updated information.
• I would love it if this table of contents was filterable - e.g. if a user is looking for all processes tagged with a certain term they should be able to surface those. 
• There should also be a panel with details of the most recently updated processes.
• Lastly, a search bar for specifically searching all processes.

Any suggestions are appreciated!

Oliver Siebenmarck {Polymetis Apps}

Hi @Nicki Schermann ,

Welcome to the community!

I believe you're on the right track, Confluence is a great tool for libraries of any kind and especially processes. 

My first recommendation would be to create one or more templates for your process descriptions. Be sure to include labels in your template, that makes everything easier. 

Your template should also include a Page Properties Macro with every attribute you want to display on the front page. Most Confluence templates already have this, so there should be plenty of examples to look at. 

You can then use a Page Properties Report on the front page to display a dynamically created table with all your pages that have a specific label. Personally, instead of filtering the table, I would suggest using multiple tables instead. Like one for all processes, and one for each specific type. If that amounts to a lot of tables in your org, then it might be a good idea to have different sub-front pages for specific process types or areas.

As you are going by label, it doesn't matter too much how you structure the pages, as a page can easily appear in multiple pages. For example, a process could be labelled process, process-sop and process-how-to and appear in different places. 

There also is a macro for recently updated pages, and of course, you can also select which pages to include by using labels. 

Finally, there is a search macro that you can add. And it allows you to search only a subset of pages defined by, you guessed it, labels!

Hope that helps, let us know how it goes!

Cheers,
 Oliver

P.S. Really, labels are the most amazing and in my mind most underused, feature of Confluence.  We are such big fans of labels, we even wrote an app called Magic Labels to make labelling pages in Confluence easier, be sure to give it a try!