Michelle Rau HP Rising Star

I first used the Page Properties macros to post a backlog of meeting recordings. I needed to sort the list by event date, not created or modified date, and the Page Properties and Page Properties Report macros (PP and PPR for convenience) enabled that. Since then, learning this macro combination has paid off in several…

Hi, I'm looking for some examples of beautiful, attractive or interesting Confluence pages created with mostly out-of-the-box Confluence functionality, that don't look quite so much like typical Confluence. The idea is to help new or average Confluence users by giving them some examples of Confluence pages that are…

A great thing about the Atlassian Community: we are not alone in our struggles. I'd developed some "personal coping mechanisms" for using the Import Word Document feature in Confluence. When I joined the Atlassian Community, I learned that others had the same struggles, some on a much larger scale. So I'm sharing my…

For several years, I used Graham Hannington's website "Wikifier RT" to convert Confluence format to wiki markup. It was incredibly useful especially when using the Reporting series of nested macros. Now the site just returns errors. Does anyone know what happened, and is there an alternative that's live? Old explanation /…

Hi, it's been awhile since I've worked with Scaffolding / Live Templates. What I want to know is, can a user in wiki space B create a page in their space using a Live Template in wiki space A? (in Confluence server, not cloud) (With the built-in Confluence templates, it is possible to start a new page by referencing a…

This is maybe more of an Agile or Scrum question, but here goes. As a technical writer, some of my documentation work for a project aligns with specific features for the project, and some of it pertains to the project overall. It has been challenging to track my docs to-dos in terms of Epics, Stories, sub-tasks, etc. (I…

Unique visitors. Page views. Time spent on page. Pages per visit. Entry and exit pages. Click path. All those cool web metrics that help people decide where their site needs improvement? I don't have those. Yet. But by being creative—and very, very stubborn, I mean determined—I have different metrics. Labels in use. Pages…

Not long ago, there was a back-end change to our wiki instance, and our URL changed. I had a problem with that. More accurately, hundreds of little problems: broken hard links that went to the old URL! Dynamic links update themselves, and we love them for it. I needed to find and convert hard links to dynamic ones when…

I hope someone can explain this behavior to me. I created a new page with a UML diagram in it using the PlantUML macro. A couple of curious users apparently browsed the page, and shortly afterwards I got notifications like the below. The versions of the page have NOT changed. The versions of the attachment DID change. And…

My end users have gotten spoiled with a customized search / help links panel that I had positioned in the upper right of the page using CSS. After our latest update to 7.19.1, it is a mess! And I don't know how to fix it, or how to start over. (CSS is not a superpower of mine -- yet.) Before, It looked like this: It is…

Love them or hate them, FAQs remain a popular format to inform and educate. I am often asked to create or format FAQs. Usually I use the “Table of Contents” method (below) for FAQs on a single page, but we have use cases where we need to retrieve FAQs published on different pages. Here are several ways to format and list…

Recently I have had two different Page Properties Reports, calling from two different sets of pages, that don't sort properly. In each case, the first item in the list is "sticky" and stays in position even if the other column headings can be clicked on to sort the other items. Each PPR specifies an initial sort by one of…

As I got to know my new lab at work and its wiki space, I made several usability tweaks to help users (and myself). Then I helped a second lab with their wiki space. And another. And then another. I now had a standard “list” of usability tweaks, which took about an hour to implement. Not bad, but I couldn’t do this for…

One of my first tasks as a new technical writer was to post a backlog of meetings with replay links and materials on our lab’s wiki space. I realized the only way to list events in event date order (not page creation or modification date order) was to reorder the pages manually in the page tree. This worked, but I knew I’d…

One of the top questions Confluence users ask me is, "Where should I put a particular page in the wiki space page tree?" For example, a page on debugging could fall under Quality, Development, Startup, or How-To depending on its focus. Or a page on a particular tool could fall under Tools, Testing, Connectivity or Debug…

I am looking for some thoughts, advice, best practices on how to organize some information that spans multiple wiki spaces. This is a fairly typical challenge of a centralized group providing a service to distributed groups, such as HR or Finance providing support to business units. We have a team, I, which provides a…

Hi all, I'm asking for suggestions, ideas and brainstorms related to documenting / tracking / relating many products and their many, many features in Confluence. Essentially, we need to document which products do or don't have which features, and if they do, link(s) to the documentation that provides more detail. The scale…

Hi, I'm wondering if there's a way to specify "parent of the current page" when creating a URL to create a page from a template. I know it's possible to specify the template and parent page by using this syntax:…

Learning how to make UML diagrams in Confluence was an uphill slog at first. A lifelong learn-by-doing disciple, I’d bent HTML, CSS and JavaScript to my will through sheer force of personality and lots of Googling and dark chocolate. But without any background in computer science, without having ever written code, UML…

I use a separate wiki space to prototype and pressure-test features before implementing them in other spaces. As a new wiki space admin, I went through a clumsy phase, leaving a trail of broken pages, clunky CSS and missing search boxes behind me. I tried to control the chaos by using the “Wiki Admin” page as a sandbox…bad…

As a brand-new wiki space admin, I needed to discover all the add-ons and macros that were available to me and to the average user. Over 230 items were listed in the macro browser—a bit overwhelming! I wanted my own list to speed up browsing, organize my "toolbox" and record my own notes. This personal list became a…

One nice thing about being a Confluence wiki space admin is the ability to build in tweaks and tools that make it easier to administer a space. As a technical writer and space admin, I copied and pasted wiki page links into email about a bazillion times a day. I wanted my copy-able page links to work a certain way.…

I need to evaluate the pros and cons of different methods of managing access to certain content. I'm sure I'm way overthinking this but if there are additional factors I haven't considered please chime in. The content is "advanced" but not sensitive or super-secret. It could confuse an average user of our wiki space so…

Recently I showed a technical program manager a UML timing diagram I made while learning to create them. It compared the timing of Agile sprints, feature development, software releases, and development milestones. “I have some serious cognitive dissonance going on here,” he laughed. “I’ve used timing diagrams, but I’ve…

This is a strange one. Very occasionally, I will be notified that someone has added a PNG file that was generated by the PlantUML macro to a page that contains the same UML diagram. They haven't made any other edits on the page or to the diagram or to any other attachments, nor does the new PNG appear anywhere on the page.…

Hi, I hope I'm missing something obvious here. :-) I have a had a free personal Trello account for a long time (personal email). I have a more recently created Atlassian account (work email). And a still more recent Confluence Cloud account (personal email). I am trying to get the Trello card previews within a Confluence…

When I started managing a wiki space, I wanted to find out which sections, or branches of the page tree, were growing the fastest and might need more oversight. But I didn't have any analytics. What next? Fortunately, I was able to use ServiceRocket's Reporting add-on to generate a workable report. When combined with…

Something I'd like to do for several pages is to be able to generate a Table of Contents from the titles, or heading text, in panels. For example, if I have three panels with titles Version 1, Version 2, Version 3, I want my table of contents to be, * Version 1 * Version 2 * Version 3 I've learned that the CSS class for…

Does anyone have information about creating a dropdown menu in Confluence server using Tridion? Thanks!