đź“„ Advanced Editing | ACA-920 Confluence Essentials Session #3
Last week we covered the basics of editing - including things like making pages and how to use the editing functions… now it’s time to get a bit deeper into what options are available for us when we edit pages.
Atlassian Intelligence (AI)
AI is available in Cloud Premium and Enterprise and offers some interesting tools to help us edit our content. At its most basic AI can help us generate ideas or create things like outlines. Personally I find this useful for helping get past writer’s block as it can help redirect my thoughts or help me get over being stuck. AI can also change the tone of what we’ve written, which can be helpful if our audience changes (or if we can’t get the tone quite right).
There are, however, more interesting use cases for AI that I’ve found. One is its ability to summarize content. Instead of having to read an entire page, you can have the tool simply summarize it for you. This is great for longer pieces of content, or, more commonly, when I’ve found something right before a call and I don’t have time to read everything. Summarize also works on recent changes - something I find to be very useful. Some pages change very frequently, so having the tool just summarizes what’s new since I last viewed it helps me stay on track and understand what’s changes.
Another useful tool is the ability to define terms and acronyms. At first I didn’t think I would use this all that much, but I’ve found it to be one of the better features… especially if I’m new to a team or unfamiliar with how they operate. (New joiners also find this very useful!). It helps us understand what these terms mean, and also gives us context for why the tool thinks that is the definition in the form of links and references (to help rule out hallucinations.
Macros
Our next stop in the advanced editing section was on Macros. These are essentially small programs or extensions that give us more functionality in Confluence. This can be a basic thing, like adding a coloured panel to a page, or a more complex thing, like mirroring content across multiple spaces. Macros are available either from the “+” menu in the edit toolbar, or by typing in “/” when editing (my preferred method).
There are many, many, macros, so we didn’t talk about all of them, but there were some favorites:
Table of Contents - dynamically builds a linked table of contents based on headers. One that I use on almost every single page I build as it makes it much easier to find things.
Excerpt - defines an area of the page that can be pulled into other pages. Allows you to mirror content - something I use frequently for “background” information that can be pulled into an index.
Expand - Puts a collapsible section on the page that can show, or hide, information in it. Helpful for breaking up the page and managing what’s visible.
Panels - Adds a panel to the page that includes colours. Useful for visually calling attention to something (like a warning).
Labels list - Displays a list of all the labels in a specified space. Helpful for managing labels (particularly identifying near duplicates).
I am working on a series of youtube videos that break down the common macros - so stay tuned for something that is (hopefully!) fun!
Restrictions
We finished out our advanced session by talking about Restrictions. This is probably the most confusing part of Confluence for most folks, so taking time to understand them is important! The ability to add a restriction to a page is a Space-level permission. This means your space admin can allow, or prevent, you from adding them (so if you don’t see them, chat with a space admin!).
There are three types of restrictions:
Everyone can view and edit - Anyone who has view access to the space can see this page, and anyone with edit access for pages can edit it. This is the default, and most permissive, permission.
Everyone can view, only some can edit - Anyone with view access to the space can view it, but only people specified in the restriction can edit the page. This is fairly common as sometimes only specific people (e.g. experts or certain folks) should be able to change things.
Only some can view or edit - The most restrictive. This hides the content from anyone who isn’t on the “view” list, and prevents editing unless you’re on the “edit list.
There are two considerations we have to keep in mind that commonly trip folks up (and given their importance are very likely going to show up on the exam if you take it!)
View permissions inherit down to children - This means if Page A has a child, and I restrict View access on Page A, it’s child will also be restricted.
Edit permissions do not inherit down to children - This means if I can edit Page A, it doesn’t necessarily mean I can edit it’s children.
Check out the recording below - and hope to see you in the next session!
