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📓 Restrict who can Approve Pages in Confluence

Peggy Graham

Remember those book reports you had to write in high school English, usually based on some really long, ancient novel? (Wuthering Heights comes to mind for me! " data-testid="image-emoji-

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How did you power through, did you:

A - Watch the movie

B - Read the CliffNotes

C - Actually read the book?

(It’s OK, you don’t have to tell me…)

In the spirit of working smarter and not harder, I wanted to share a quick overview of how to use Confluence automations to restrict who can approve pages. And because we all learn differently, here are all three versions: watch the movie, skim the CliffNotes, AND read the book!

📝 The Assignment

Confluence page statuses are visual indicators that show a page's current position in its lifecycle. The default options look like this:

The assignment is to limit which Confluence users can approve a page, or in other words, set the page status to Verified. If any user tries to approve a page and they do not have permission to do so, Confluence will revert the page back to Ready for review or whatever status you may be using.

🎥 Watch the movie:

Watch the video ⤴️

🗒️ Read the CliffNotes:

If you want to set this up in your own environment, here’s all you need to do:

Create the Confluence Approvers group (requires admin permissions)
- admin.atlassian.com → Directory -> Groups -> Create group button
- Add all users who should be able to approve pages
Create the automation
- Confluence Space Settings → Automations
- Trigger: Page Status Changed to Verified
- IF Condition: User who triggered the event is NOT in group, above
- Action: Change Page Status to “Ready for review”
Test it out
- As an authorized approver: Verify that the page stays in Verified status when updated, published, and the page is refreshed.
- As an UNauthorized approver: Verify that the page reverts back to “Ready for Review” when updated, published, and the page is refreshed.

📚 Read the book:

1 - Create the Confluence Approvers group:

Click the ⚙️ in the upper right corner (requires admin permissions)

Then click on Groups on the left side menu.
Click on Create group button. Add all users who should be able to approve pages:

NOTE: Whenever you need to add or remove approvers in the future, you just need to edit the user group in admin.atlassian.com:

2 - Create the automation:

Step one: Automation Trigger step:

In your Confluence space, go into Space Settings, then Automations.
Click the Create rule option, then click “Create from scratch”.
Trigger should be: Page status changed.
Select the Verified (or whatever you consider your Approved status) and then click Next.

Step two: Automation IF condition step:

Click on the yellow IF: Add a condition
Click on User condition
Click on User who triggered the event is NOT in group
- The NOT is the important part. We want to revert the page if they are not in that group, which is why we check for the NOT condition.
In the group box, find the approver group we created earlier

Step three: Automation Action step:

Click on the blue “THEN: Add an action” option
Add “Change page status” option:
Change the page status back to “Ready for review”. (Or whatever status you use to indicate a review is needed.)
Your automation rule should now look like the image to the right.

Step four: Turn on the rule:

Click Turn on rule and give the new role a name.
As a best practice, I like to set the automation rules so that they can be edited by all admins. That way, if there are any issues in the future and I’m not around, another admin can edit the automation.

3 - Test the automation:

For a user who is NOT in your approval group, test the following:

Change the status of any page in this space to Verified.
Publish and then refresh the page.
Check that the page reverts back to “Ready for review”.

For a user who IS in your approval group, test the following:

Change the status of any page in this space to Verified.
Publish and then refresh the page.
Check that the page stays in the “Verified” status.

🍎 Extra Credit:

For those who want extra credit, here’s where you can take this even further, full credit to Jonathan Smith and Darryl Lee who shared the following approaches to automate even more of the process:

In addition, did you know that Confluence has an out-of-the-box automation template to help ensure your content is regularly reviewed and verified to be current? This automation will look for inactive pages in the verified status (pages with no views or edits in the last 3 months - you can change this duration). The automation will then automatically un-verify the page. The page owner will be notified, asking them to review it. Here’s where you can read more about this: 📣 Verified Pages - Now Available in Confluence! ✅. Important to note, if you want to take advantage of this automation template, you will need to keep the Verified default page status.

🎓 Final Grade:

So, how’d do you? Let us know in the comments if you got a passing grade!

Comments

Anwesha Pan

Awesome! This is a great article @Peggy Graham 🙂 and it's easy to follow with your video and all the instructions! I had already done the automation part of page approval last week but I will go through the other challenges you have shared links for & see how it goes for me.

Thank you so much for sharing! 📖

Jonathan Smith

@Peggy Graham Thanks for the call-out. While we never implemented the page approvals process, we may look into it further once additional smart values become available.

The roadblock we faced was we couldn't automatically restrict the page to {{page.author}} + approver names. Our goal was to not allow the page to be visible until the page was fully approved.

Peggy Graham

@Jonathan Smith - We can have Confluence automation do that too!

I wrote an automation rule that runs whenever a new page is published. It checks the page status; if it's any status other than Verified, it restricts the page so that it can only be viewed and edited by either the original page author OR anyone in the approver group. The rule looks like this:

The page condition step that checks the page status:

page condition.png

And, the restrict page step:

Make sure you put the rule initiator and approvers in the update group, I made that mistake initially!

We would need to add a step to the page approval automation to unlock the page, which would just remove the restriction...

Please let me know if this does what you wanted, and/or if you need help with automating unlocking the page...

Kristin Lyons

Great write up!

Jonathan Smith

@Peggy Graham ,

I'm running into a bit of a brick wall here and was hoping you could assist.

We can easily create an automation that says, "When a new page is published, update status to Draft." Now, we want to apply a similar automation for when changes are made to existing pages.

The issue:

We can create an automation that says, "When a page is updated, change the page status to Draft." However, when the approver goes in to mark the status as Verified, the automation runs again and changes the status back to Draft.

Since updating the page status is considered a "page change," the page edit automation is triggered again—reverting the status to Draft.

Do you have any thoughts on this? I believe I’ve run into this before, which is why my previous post with eight other automations utilized labels.

Would love to hear your thoughts or any workarounds you might suggest.

Peggy Graham

@Jonathan Smith , I was able to replicate what you are seeing: editing the page to set the page status to approved triggers the automation that reverts the page to draft.

I wonder about this - we CAN check who the rule initiator is, so, what if the automation on a page edit checks if the rule initiator is in the page approvers group? If they ARE in the approver group and the page status = approved, then the automation should do nothing, because we can safely assume that the edit done was to approve the page.

If the page was edited by someone who is NOT in the approver's group, then set the page status to draft? No labels needed, which simplifies things quite a bit...

I will try to test this out to see if it works! 🤞🏻

Kris Klima _K15t_

@Peggy Graham

This is cool and very useful, I fooled around with using workflow statuses and automation to trigger marketplace apps that take advantage of page status / change. It was like building a virtual app cluster

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