Non-Unique Page Names & URL Rules

[Nathan Farrar]

I'd like to do the following:

• Be able to have pages with the same names.
• Modify the way that the page URLs work, specifically:
  • Make the URLS for pages reflect the full path to the page (see below).
  • Make all URLS lowercase.
  • Replace spaces in page names with dashes (see below).
  • Specify (in some cases) a value that should be used for the last part of the page url, rather than the name.

Here's a basic example of why I want to do this:

I organize my wiki into sections. So, for example with my 'home' wiki - I have several "root" sections, but for this example, only the following two are relevant:

• Projects - This section contains sub-sections that contain project pages. The sub-sections are things like Automation and Networking.
• Products - This section contains sub-sections that contain product pages. The sub-sections are things like Automation and Networking.

Using the default behavior, the hierarchy and urls look like this: 

• Home ➡ Projects ➡ Automation Projects ➡ Project 01: https://url/wiki/display/home/Project+01
• Home ➡ Projects ➡ Networking Projects ➡ Project 02: https://url/wiki/display/home/Project+02
• Home ➡ Products ➡ Automation Products ➡ Product 01: https://url/wiki/display/home/Product+01
• Home ➡ Products ➡ Networking Products ➡ Product 02: https://url/wiki/display/home/Product+02

The way I set organize my wikis, this is very limiting. It forces me to name pages to work around the unique naming restriction and it doesn't reflect where the user is in the wiki.

For my structure, it would be much, much better to have something like:

• Home ➡ Projects ➡ Automation ➡ Project 01: https://url/wiki/display/home/projects/automation/01
• Home ➡ Projects ➡ Networking ➡ Project 02: https://url/wiki/display/home/projects/networking/02
• Home ➡ Products ➡ Automation ➡ Product 01: https://url/wiki/display/home/products/automation/01
• Home ➡ Products ➡ Networking ➡ Product 02: https://url/wiki/display/home/projucts/automation/02

This would allow me to use shorter, more concise names. It also makes it obvious where in the wiki structure the user is currently located.

I'm currently using a hosted instance, but have some new servers I'm installing this week and plan to very shortly move to a self-hosted setup. 

Is doing something like this possible? Has anyone done it, have any advice?

• With a self-hosted wiki, is it possible through configuration options?
• Are there any plugins that already exist that could do this?
• If I took the time to write my own plugin, could I accomplish something like this?
• Could I use a specialized/customized proxy (apache, nginx, etc) configuration to rewrite the URLs to do something like this?

[Rob Woodgate]

To add to what Nic is (correctly) saying, you're essentially doing the same thing as asking if you can have the same value in more than one row in a primary key column in a database.  I'm not sure of the internal database structure of Confluence, but Atlassian have never allowed duplicate page titles in a space, and it seems likely that this is as much a hard database limit as a design decision.

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

In Confluence, a page name has to be unique in a given space.  So, the short answer is "no"

There are some add-ons which allow you to fake duplicate names, sort of, but I don't think any of them support the structures you've defined here - they're aimed at different things.  Have a look at Scroll Versions and Viewport (and check the rest of the marketplace, those are just the two I've used that might be helpful)