Is it possible to determine if a confluence page was created using a template?

[Craig Heath]

Hi,

Background:

We have a lot of Spaces within out Confluence environment, used for a variety of different purposes.

There are quite a few pages scattered across these Spaces that are what we call "Communities Of Practice". Another term for them would Guilds.

Its been proposed that we move all these COP pages to a new Space so people can find them more easily.

We use Live Templates in some places, which presented its own challenges when moving the COP pages, as the Live Templates are not moved with the rest.

But the other challenge we have is the normal out-of-the-box Confluence templates that have been used to create pages, many of which (the templates) have been hand-written.

I can move the pages that were created using a template happily, and they keep working (unlike the Live Template pages), but sooner or later someone complains as their starting template for a new page is not present in the new space.

So the question - is it possible to tell that a given page in Confluence was created from a template, and if so, which template it was? If I know the name I can preempt the problem by cloning that template and putting it in the new Space.

The only other option that I'm aware of is to promote all our templates to Global, so they are visible in all spaces, but our Confluence admin has rejected that suggestion partly due to volumes, and also because of duplicate Template names (I believe).

Thanks.

P.S. This Confluence support page (

https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/create-a-page-from-a-template-296093793.html) 

says in the notes that "Once a page has been added using a template, the template is no longer linked to the page.".

If that is actually the case then I expect that I can't determine that a page started from a template, but I thought I'd ask to be sure.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Your instinct is correct, once a template has been used, there's no way to know that it was the starting point of a particular page.

There are some human tricks, but they're manual and far from fool-proof:

• For more complex templates, most authors won't move away from it much, so you can usually tell.  Plus if someone likes a page built from a template, but doesn't know about a template, they may well copy the page, so in a sense, it was still from the template.
• Include something in the template, like a footer section or label, that identifies the template. Your humans are very unlikely to remove it.
• If you are willing to fiddle with logs, you should be able to see when people hit the "create from x" part, but there's no guarantee they'll complete the page