Filter Pages by Page Status

Celeste Ramirez

Hello everyone!

I was curious if there were a way to create a filter that would display all of the pages in a space that have a specific status?

This would be an amazing widget to put on or near the top level of a space so users can see what pages are in progress or ready for review, and perhaps streamline the process of vetting the information in our pages by multiple people.

 

Thanks for your time!

Max Foerster - K15t

Hey @Celeste Ramirez , welcome to the community! 👋🏼 You have a few ways to address this in Confluence at the moment. I would like to expand on @Bill Bailey's answer because it only works under certain conditions/with specific Confluence macros.

The most important thing is that it does not work with the latest page status feature recently added to Confluence. 

I'll be happy to explain in detail two ways that I hope will help you.

 

Reporting on page statuses with the status macro and page properties

You need to use the status macro and page properties. For the report, you use the page properties report.

You add your data and the status macro to a table in the page properties macro and can pull it into a report based on a page label. The table exists on the page in Confluence. It's pretty straightforward. 😁

That's an example of the table design on the page with some metadata like the status:

The report will look something like this. You can even customize the report a bit.

This approach has a huge disadvantage because the status is only used as a macro and can be edited by any user. So you can't specify a fixed list and have a standardized set of statuses. You will have to educate the users on which statuses work best. 

The second disadvantage is that the macro for the report on the page properties does not provide filters for the report's content. You can only filter what to pull into the report based on a few things like labels, parent pages, titles, contributors, etc.

You can read more about it in the Confluence documentation:

• Insert the status macro
• Insert the page properties macro 
• Insert the page properties report macro 

 

Reporting on Confluence page statuses (content statuses) with Orderly databases for Confluence

If you want to use the page status (or content status like it is called in the UI) feature in Confluence spaces, you will need to tackle this differently. Mainly because it's still missing one or two essential features:

• You have no way to quickly get an overview of page statuses as they are not supported by the page property report and the Confluence search
• You cannot quickly edit the status without having to open the page editor and edit the page itself.

 

Start using the regular page status on pages like you would like to. That's the very easy part. 😄 If you now want to report on them and also have a way to be able to edit them from one central location (or on that page) without using the editor, I suggest having a look at our app Orderly Databases for Confluence on the Atlassian Marketplace. 

It's like tables and page properties but on steroids (and in smart) 😄 We recently added support for the page status field to the app to work with it more easily internally and to have a workaround for the given limitations. 😕

The gif below shows you a snippet of a table in Orderly with linked pages and their page status (and some other metadata you usually add to pages), which you can not only view but also edit directly. And yes, these are the page status name you have configured in that space the page is living in. So there's no messing up status names or creating inconsistencies. 🤘🏼

 

How do you get to this result?

In Orderly, the data exists not only on the page but in a database. So you don't have only the static table on a page and pull the information into a report. The information lives in this database and can be displayed and edited from everywhere.

I'll break it down to the most necessary steps on how to get the report:

1. Create a database
2. Change the title field to page link
3. Add a page status field and reference the title field
4. Create a new entry linking it to a page
5. The page status is pulled into the database and you can edit it there as well

I recorded a quick and dirty screencast for you to see what I did. 😄 Including me forgetting the page name to add it to the database. You can also see that you can filter the database view. And later on save the filter as a standard view in macros to display a report on pages

Let me know if you have any questions. I'm happy to help!

Best, Max