Different Version Control strategies within Confluence Cloud

[#1]

Hello Community! This is my first article here discussing something really interesting that I think will help a lot of people. However, I should inform you that this article refers to 2 applications developed by the company I work for, QC Analytics.

The topic I wanted to talk about is no other than Version Control and the different ways you can do this within the Confluence Cloud.

Why Version Control is important

Being able to manage documents' versions is of great importance for organizations since it allows them to see the differences between the current and last versions, and it keeps track of every change made to a page whether it is minor or major. Atlassian knows how important that is and they made sure to implement Version Control on the Confluence Cloud as well. However, here I going to talk about two more solutions for page Version Control.

How to do it within Confluence Cloud

There are 3 possible ways you can control the version of your pages:

• based on built-in Confluence Version Control,

• based on QC Revision Value,

• based on the Page Properties macro.

Based on built-in Confluence Version Control

This is the easiest and simplest way to control your pages' versions. The built-in Confluence Version number will increase every time you make changes within a page, whether they are minor or major changes. To use this Version Control strategy you do not have to do any extra work since Confluence will do everything for you.

Based on QC Revision Value

To use the “based on QC Revision Value” strategy, you need to have installed our app called QC Documents for the Confluence Cloud. When choosing this versioning option, you have to make sure you that all of your pages have a QC Revision Value assigned. To assign such value all you have to do is go to QC Page Revision Overview and add a Revision for each Confluence Version.

Based on the Page Properties macro

This version strategy allows you to add decimal numbers and have better control over your page version. All you have to do is add a page properties macro within your page, inside the macro you add a table, on the left column you type your header (e.g Version) and on the right you type the version number of your like (e.g. 4.5.6).

The QC Read & Understood for Confluence Cloud app let’s you use this Version Control strategy in an interesting way, to keep track of pages' approvals.

So, there you have some different ways to keep track of your page versions. I hope you find this helpful!

Do you have any other interesting ways to Version Control your Confluence documents?

[Dave Jennings]

I use Page Properties a lot but is there any way to make the table be left-adjusted rather than full-width when it's on a full-width page?

My current work-around is to insert a two column layout but that leads to some unnecessary white space above and below and is a bit fragile.

[Sofia Kargioti _QC Analytics_]

Hello @Dave Jennings 

I think that, since the Page Properties macro can only be adjusted according to the page, then the table you insert inside it can't be left-adjusted as well. Unfortunately, I don't think you can left-adjust a table outside of a Page Properties macro as well.

However, that would be kind of an interesting feature to see implemented!

[Dave Jennings]

Hi @Sofia Kargioti _QC Analytics_.

Yes, I'm pretty sure the problem is that you can't have a non-full-width table on a full-width page. Any time you have some sort of key / value set of entries it looks pretty silly with a full-width table.

In this case it's Atlassian's own macro, Page Properties, that requires the key / value pairs, so I wondered if you had a solution.

The default fixed width pages are probably fine on mobile devices, but on workstation screens there is a lot of wasted space, so I prefer full-width. Unfortunately that makes these sort of tables look pretty ungainly.

It'd be great if this could be addressed. Then a bunch of pages that I'm keeping in the old editor could move to the new one.