Splitting spaces without breaking links?

[Amanda Gowland]

We are finally in the process of mass adoption of Confluence. We are now organising our spaces and because of departmental structure changes, I have one space that is now comprised of two departments. I need to split this one space into two, but there is a lot of cross-linking within the space and the links break when we try and move pages into a new space.

Is there a way around this? A plug-in?

[Alejandro Conde Carrillo · Accepted solution]

Hi Amanda.

There is a free third party plugin Copy Partial Space which seems to offer that functionality. I have not tried it myself but may be you can give it a go and share your experience with us.

[Amanda Gowland]

Thanks Alex - it seems to work! I posted more feedback below.

[Stefan Eike]

Hi Alex,

am I right, that these plug-in keeps the links alive? Or what is the difference to moving a page and its children?

[Amanda Gowland]

Our webmaster installed the plugin and this was his feedback:

I performed the following tests:
1. Create a "Test Space" with a couple of pages and child-pages inside
2. Duplicate the "Test Space" completely to a new one.
=> Result: all links inside kept working fine, and they all pointed to the new space. The old space remained active as well, and obviously external links will have to be fixed.

3. Duplicate just a "branch" of the "Test Space" to create sort-of a "sub-space".
=> Result: all links inside kept working fine, even if now they were "one level up". Again, external links will have to be fixed.

In conclusion, I'd say the plugin helps quite a lot. There are a couple of gothas however:

- not being able to "move" a section of a space instead of "copying" it. That would have the added effect of going through all external links and updating them to reflect the new space. We can workaround it by manually editing external links, but it's going to be time-consuming.

- the permissions are not copied along with the new space. That means any "private" pages within will suddenly become public. We need to go and check all these and make them private again after the "branching".