nav[aria-label="Primary Navigation"] { padding: 0; & ul { list-style: none; width: 100%; display: flex; flex-direction: row; justify-content: start; align-items: start; gap: 30px; padding: 0; & li { margin: 0; } & ul li { list-style: none; } } }

Is it possible to create a sitemap of Confluence?

Tom_48sw2e

Our confluence is more than a decade old and in that time it’s become a bit of a free for all with no constraints on who can create what and where. We’ve also never had a tidy of it so it’s an unwieldy beast!! Ahead of a move to Confluence Cloud we’d like to properly understand how it’s become structured, so that if there are parts of it that are well organised we don’t lose that and can encourage others to follow a similar directory structure when on cloud. The problem is that building a map of its structure manually will take forever - is there a better way to map it please?

Accepted answers

All comments

Radek Dostál

Not quite sure what your aim is. Who's to say which "structure" is good and which is bad, and what even does structure mean.

You can generate page trees w/ a macro, and you could, given some tweaking with javascript, be able to automatically expand all dropdowns in content tools view. But I don't think Confluence gives any such a "structure" view that easily otherwise, the macro is probably the closest to it but even that is an overhead and is limited to levels.

What I don't see is, even if you did manage to get it, how that would be of any use. Who is the arbitor of which structure is right and who's to say a page outside this "desired structure" is not being used and/or is not a critical component of a Space.

Tom_48sw2e

Thanks. The page tree macro you mention sounds like a step in the right direction- does it have a name please?

Our CTO has already designed a high level structure for how he’d like to see our new cloud confluence organised. Right now we have so much content we can’t even see if anyone at all organises content in this way, or if perhaps maybe there’s a better way that he hasn’t considered.

ideally we would have an ‘as is’ sitemap / page tree showing what we currently have and a ‘to be’ sitemap / page tree showing where we are heading next so we can discuss the proposed change at a suitable level of detail

Tom_48sw2e

Let me give you another example to help illustrate why this is needed. As part of the CTOs proposed structure he’s keen that Squads have their own places to put content relating to themselves, but do so in a consistent manner.

I estimate that we have had maybe 400 squads during the last decade (some are long lived whereas others are short lived). Let’s assume that 50% of them created Squad specific pages in Confluence. Each would have done so largely independently. That’s 200 squads page structures we need to a) locate b) review and c) consolidate.

For example…

Squad 1 might have pages called:

who we are

how to engage with us

meet the team

our expertise

Squad 2 might have pages called:

meet the team

onboarding

how we operate

planning cycles

You can see two different approaches being taken, both equally valid. With visibility of just those two sources you could propose that a Squads pages should consist of:

who we are

our expertise

how we operate

meet the team

onboarding

how to engage with us

planning cycles

(There might be duplication or consolidation opportunities in there - but having a proposed ‘to be’ structure will spark debate, which is needed)

We need visibility of what’s there so we can create ‘best of’ structures like this but at a large scale.

Radek Dostál

https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/page-tree-macro-163414255.html

Which has "Expand all" as well in the options.

You would need to do this per space (which could be automated w/ a cURL or REST to update the page and switch the space key). The storage format contains

<ri:space ri:space-key="{{ SPACEKEY }}" />

which is easy enough to replace and post as a page update. You can place this macro on any page really, ideally an empty one so that the content can then be read/stored/parsed, so this would be one way to get there.

But still, it's overhead, probably kind of annoying and could take half a day to automate and build a map out of, not exactly.. elegant, quick, or good, but, that's probably the closest to getting it out of box if we're not talking more complex methods.

It would be possible - and be more efficient - to create a user macro which would iterate over all spaces, build the map, and print it all at once on a single page. That would take a bit of coding though.. Theory is "Macros can also access objects available in the default Velocity context" (source: https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/user-macro-template-syntax-223906130.html), which in turn means the possibility to use $spaceManager and $pageManager (source: https://developer.atlassian.com/server/confluence/confluence-objects-accessible-from-velocity/), both of which can be used to get and iterate over the pages the build a tree.

I don't have any code at hand nor do I see any through a few searches though, but all in all this would probably be the most optimal approach, but either one of them would take time.

Another option I can think of is SQL, but the db design is such spaghetti I'm writing that one off already, too much work and headache.

Another one would be to crawl through the spaces with REST (relying on content/search), but that's more of a pain than a user macro, plus it takes far more steps.

So overall a few options. Unless somebody else has a better suggestion or already did something like this, I'll take a look at the user macro and see if I can scramble it together next week (if you're not in that much of a hurry).

Tom_48sw2e

Test

Welcome!

It looks like you're new here. Sign in or register to get started.

Quick Links

Find more posts tagged with

confluence

server

confluence-server