Making Confluence Pages Public — is there a way to ensure some info remains internal/private?

Question

Hello community!

I saw the announcement that there would be an easy way to share public links to confluence pages and believe that we should now be able to have an internal/external knowledge base for our staff and also our customers, essentially in one space.

However, when sharing help articles, FAQ's etc, it is important that we have the ability to ensure that some content remains hidden from public view (only for our internal staff).

Is there some way to publish a confluence page to the public, but also have note sections which are only visible internally?

Or might this have to be done via a seperate field at the page level?

Or perhaps I'm thinking about this the wrong way and there is a better way to achieve this?

Look forward to reading your suggestions on the best-practice way to achieve this.

Thanks in advance!

Kristian Klima_gtcuat · Answer

@Beau White

We're using Scroll Documents with Variants and Scroll Viewport apps to create two documentation sites (public + internal behind SSO) from a single Confluence space.

Variants is, essentially, a conditional content app and you use it to designate which content goes where. Then you just label the pages or sections of the pages.

We designate which pages and/or which sections of any specific page (using the app's macro) will end up on the public site and which on the internal site.

In practice, the content is 90% identical but we can display jira links, internal only docs, etc. only to the internal audiences.

Example:

Public content: label = external, condition = only pages labelled external

Internal content: label = internal, condition = all pages labelled external + any page labelled internal

The above setup also ensures that a PUBLIC page with a internal labelled macro will appear in the public site without your internal section, but will contain that internal section in your private site.

It takes about 30 minutes to set up.

Ignacio Aredez GenAI Expert · Answer

Leveraging Excerpts for Controlled Visibility
One approach to achieve a mix of public and private content on a single page is to use the "Excerpt" macro for public content and the "Excerpt Include" macro on a separate, restricted internal page. This allows you to display the same content in two different places with different visibility settings. However, it doesn’t directly solve the issue of hiding specific sections within a single public page.