Linking to pages with special characters in the sidebar?

Question

I'm using the Documentation Theme (on Confluence 5.4) and configuring the sidebar.

In the Navigation field for the Sidebar, I'm adding links to a few pages for easy access.

Each page has a special character, a colon (:) in the title.

I've tried the following:

* [Page: Name]
* [Page%3A Name]

Instead of bringing me to the correct page, Confluence pops up an "Add new page" with the title "Page%3A Name."

Any suggestions?

Steffen Heller · Answer

I never worked with version 5.4/documentation theme/sidebar but can't you just use the same syntax that you get when you automatically insert a link on a normal confluence page?

When I do that I get

[Page:Name|:Page:Name]

for a link to a page called "Page:Name".

Jenn Leaver · Answer

I asked this question on the Confluence documentation page for "Configuring the Documentation Theme" as well. Rachel Robins supplied this answer (with a workaround):

I'm sorry I don't have an answer to your question. In wikimarkup the : is used to indicate a space key, so I am not surprised that it wont interpret it as part of the page title.   I see you've also posted this question on Answers. I hope someone from the community has a nifty workaround for you.

One workaround I did try was putting the entire URL in the wikimarkup which appeared to work. Not ideal, but did work. In the example below my page title was Colon: Page.

[Colon: Page|http://yoursite/display/SPACEKEY/Colon%3A+Page]

If you are not using the Header and Footer functionality in the Documentation theme you might want to try using the default theme instead. You can configure the Default theme to show the whole page tree like the documentation theme does and  easily add and remove shortcuts without needing wikimarkup.  There's info this here Configuring a Sidebar.   The default theme sidebar had no problems with shortcut links to pages that contain colons in the title, and it is much easier to manage the shortcuts.

If anyone has a different workaround that would create the link without providing the full URL, I would appreciate it!