What is an ancestor page?

[Joelle Beasley]

I am trying to find out what an ancestor page is. I have macros on my site that refer to them and I'd like to understand more about what they are and what they do.

[Aron Gombas _Midori_]

In Confluence, pages are organized into a tree structure.

(Mathematically speaking, it is a forest, because it can contain multiple trees. Also, it can be a flat list, if you don't organize them into a hierarchy, that's also legal.)

That means that each page, except the ones in the topmost level, have a parent. A parent can also have its own parent, which is the grandparent of the original page. Parent, grandparent, etc. are called together ancestors.

See a hierarchy like this:

• A
  • B
  • C
    • D
      • E
      • F

Here F has the parent D, but F's ancestors are D, C, A.

You need ancestors, because you need hierarchy. And you need hierarchy, because it makes  navigating and working in most spaces easier.