Editing multiple pages in Confluence

Ed Treijs September 21, 2011

Confluence 3.3.3 with Adaptavist.

I am applying the exact same change to a family of some 60 wiki pages. The same search-and-replace commands would apply to every one of the pages. Is there a way to automate this process, without getting into the code or database? It's pretty tedious opening every page in turn, clicking on edit, entering the same thing, saving....

One of the changes is to add an include statement, to reduce this issue in the future.

Actually I'm thinking the pages could work as a kind of form, where certain fields are filled in with data found elsewhere, while the structure presenting the fields remains constant. Not sure how easily I can set up this kind of system, if at all.

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CharlesH
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May 7, 2012

Actually I'm thinking the pages could work as a kind of form, where certain fields are filled in with data found elsewhere, while the structure presenting the fields remains constant. Not sure how easily I can set up this kind of system, if at all.

Confluence, with the aid of the Scaffolding & Reporting plugins, can certainly do this. The benefit of this combination is the ability to store data (or content) in a structured fashion, and re-use it easily. One technique is to set aside a page in a space for capturing a number of properties, as text-data fields for example. You can then refer to these elsewhere in the space, or even in other spaces, either just to show the values as text, or to perform conditional logic, for example to include page X if the text-data value is "1" or page Y otherwise.

There's more info on using these plug-ins over at the CustomWare Get Satisfaction site. Here's an example: http://community.customware.net/customware/topics/targeting_a_specific_page_with_local_reporter

Regards,

Charles

Bob Swift OSS (Bob Swift Atlassian Apps)
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May 7, 2012

Specifically the live template support from the Scaffold plugin is the best way to re-use a page.

Ed Treijs May 7, 2012

Sounds like we should have designed this differently from the start. The information in these pages is indeed structured. Each page actually contains the same information, just about different files. I have been simply cloning the page and replacing the text where it's different. Generating all the pages from a template and a data file would work fine, but I am not sure whether we will be able to get the plugins to try this out.

2 votes
Bob Swift OSS (Bob Swift Atlassian Apps)
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May 6, 2012
1 vote
Deleted user March 6, 2019

Okay, I have found out a way to make multiple changes in Confluence using a find+replace.

  1. Copy content to a new temporary space
  2. Export only the pages to be changed, but not the whole space
  3. Delete temporary space
  4. Open entites.xml in Notepad++ (or other simple text editor) and make the edits*
  5. Save
  6. Zip the exported files.
  7. Restore space in Conflunence admin console and confirm.
  8. Delete the original pages that are now modified and in the temporary space.
  9. Move the pages from the temporary space to the original space.
  10. Delete the temporary space

*Be very careful with your edits. Do not modify the space key or the space name.

0 votes
Joerg Bencke May 6, 2012

You can go via Webdav and Notepad++, just make sure to not include "version.txt" to the files-mask

Deleted user February 22, 2019

Can you be more specific?

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