Confluence documentation best practice, bulk update text

[Stavros_Rougas_EasyApps]

Mistakes in your documentation make it harder for users to test your app or to solve a problem. For users any out of date content is a mistake, they do not care why.

Quick win: update the text

Focus on the text being up to date. You can’t always delay a release until all images, GIFs and videos are updated. They can take time as they often involve multiple people. Documentation text can often be changed by one person.

Use a bulk find and replace app to update the documentation text the day the new version is released.

Use case: Submit button changed to Save

The new version of App X by your company changes all the ‘Submit’ buttons to ‘Save’. This change was made based on user testing. This key action is expected to initially cause some confusion.

The documentation manager uses Find and Replace by Easy Apps to search for the word ‘Submit’. There are hundreds of pages in the documentation. She uses the option to limit searches to the parent and child pages for App X.

Before finalizing changes the documentation manager can remove pages from being changed.

Confluence documentation tools to bulk find and replace

Find and Replace by Easy Apps (our app)

It is also one of the features of Space Content Manager, a suite of tools in one app we have on the Atlassian Marketplace.

Here is another app with bulk find and replace Easy Find & Replace, Copy Pages & Spaces, Add & Remove Label.

[Andy Gladstone]

Does the preview only allow for the exclusion of pages, or specific text on pages? In your last image if those three edits were on the same page, could you just exclude the middle one and still update the top and bottom?

[Stavros_Rougas_EasyApps]

@Andy Gladstonethat is a great point. We will add this ability.

Currently (Oct 25 '23) you can only exclude per page not per occurrence. So if the term appears multiple times on the same page and you only want to change some of them in bulk this is not possible.

[Brant Schroeder]

@Stavros_Rougas_EasyApps thanks for sharing.  Having a way to bulk-manage content is a great way to improve productivity.   

[Stavros_Rougas_EasyApps]

As Andy did @Brant Schroeder please share your suggestions.

We rebuilt it to work at scale and then launched it as a separate app as well, it was an original feature of Space Content Manager.

A client had a massive space and it was slow. Now it is a matter of adding cases/features and keeping it easy to use.

[Barbara Szczesniak]

@Andy Gladstone I guess the solution would be to search for click Save, rather than just Save. 

@Stavros_Rougas_EasyApps Is there a Match Case feature in the search?

[Stavros_Rougas_EasyApps]

@Barbara Szczesniak yes match case is a feature in both Find and Replace by Easy Apps and Space Content Manager (where it is one of a few tools).

It is unchecked by default, I checked it in this example to make it clearer.