What are my best beginner best practices, tips and tricks for new Confluence users?

[#1]

Hi All,

First of all I am a confluence server user. In confluence there are much more to discover and explore. Here are few of my favorite little thinks of confluence and how I use them in my own way…

• Page tree

When I first started with confluence, I was confused with page structure of spaces and where to find anything. And also we all know that each of us are different from each other, each space is different from each other too. This is because the purpose of spaces are different. But for viewers and editors of your space it is super important to maintain an organized page tree.

If you have a messy space, try cleaning it up. Maintain your space and page tree well. Delete unwanted pages and arrange pages in a more logical order. So users have to spend few time finding the exact content that they looking for.

• Templates and blue prints

For documentation and record keeping, we usually use same page structures. For beginners it is very important to know that confluence have this cool feature where you can create space templates. It makes your life easier and make your experience with confluence more effective.

Also there are wonderful blue prints to use. We usually use meeting notes blue prints and how to articles. These blue prints also improves search-ability of your confluence space.

Here is a template we regularly use Add-on evaluation with confluence templates

• Drafts , page history

When I started writing content in confluence pages I used to save page every time I made a change. So I ended up creating a very long page history entries. The issue here is when you try to restore a previous edit, you have to go through all of those unwanted history entries to find the history entry you want.

This is where I started using preview option more often, as a practice I preview the page I was working on. Also If you are working on a unpublished page, keep it as a draft so that you can change your draft as many times as you want without filling history entries, without sending unwanted notifications to page watches (if you forget to un-tick notify watches option like me 😃)

• Power of macros

Confluence provides you a list of wonderful macros like table content, status, code blocks and the list goes on. If you can spend a little time to discover the confluence macros and what they can do, I’m sure you will discover some cool pieces of macros you can use all over your pages.

Also, Confluence have an awesome option where you can create your own macros. This is call user macro. This expand your abilities on confluence little bit more. We have few user macros created and we found this fun and effective.  

Here are some of the user macros we created Color tables , MoMoss, Expand Cards