Unique page titles, why?

Question

Hi,

I'm fairly new to Confluence, but I'm struggling to organise my pages because within a space page titles have to be unique.

This creates a problem where we have common pages for specific customers for example. In a directory structure we may have something like.

"CustomerA/feedback"

"CustomerB/feedback"

So feedback is common to each customer. The string "CustomerA/feedback" is unique, just like a URL, it's the complete path that's unique. To replicate in Confluence I have to create a unique title.

"CustomerA/feedbackA"

"CustomerB/feedbackB"

Which is clunky and ugly, and is counter to directories, URLs et al.

So is there any way to get around this ? Can we make document titles non unique? Or am I barking up the wrong tree.

Regards,

Paul

Andre van der Elst · Answer

even when you create spaces for each customer you run into issues.  We have spaces for each customer, but some customers have more than 1 product developed by us. So to prevent duplicate page names we now have to create a different space for each of these product.  After years of using Confluence we now have 329 spaces which is not ideal.

I ran into the same problem when we tried using Confluence as a simple document store for our sales team with this structure:

* 'Sales' space
** potential leads
*** potential client A 
**** offers
*** potential client B
**** offers   <duplicate page name error>

I know a wiki isn't the same as a document repository, but a google search shows up this page on Atlassians own wiki about the advantages of using Confluence as a doc repository:  https://confluence.atlassian.com/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=180291149

Maybe that page should be edited and list the limitations of using Confluence as a document repository.

Jennifer S · Answer

Although a paid plugin, Scroll Versions allows duplicate page titles: https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.k15t.scroll.scroll-versions

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

It's because it's not really a tree structure - each "space" is a collection of pages.  That's it.  They have to have unique names because there isn't a tree behind it.

Atlassian have said they're not going to change this approach - https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-2524

In your case, I'd think about inverting the structure - have spaces for each customer.  Or capture feedback differently.  If you have separate spaces and wanted to join them all together, you could do something like including their feedback pages in one place.