Interacting with Pages - ACA-920 Confluence Essentials
Up until now we've mainly covered the different ways we can create and edit pages. This makes a lot of sense as this is the main thing folks do in confluence (create things!). There is, however, another part to this which is how we manage those pages.
Drafts
We started going over drafts. These are the bane of my existence, as I frequently make a new page and entirely forget about it... This means the page sits, in draft mode, forever. This wouldn't be such a big deal, expect it means I'm the only one who sees it (Org admins can come in and see them, but this is typically an extraordinary measure). The result is my content hierarchy is littered with pages that are in draft mode. Most of them will be fairly blank or not useful, but I’ve lost track of the useful pages I’ve just forgotten to publish.
The fix is easy - just publish the page! Once that's done, it's live and folks can see it. The only exception is sharing the edit link with someone else to collaborative edit the draft.
Presenter Mode
One feature I don't use much is presenter mode. Found in the more actions menu or via the “R” key when you’re viewing a page. All this does is this will change the display to something thats easier to present to others. While this doesn’t seem like much, it does make it a lot easier to share your content with a group (or in a meeting). It also lets you create a QR code for individuals to scan so they can follow along on their phone. Typically I find myself just sharing my screen with the page up, but presenter mode does a much better job of formatting and displaying things for viewers.
It also has a number of options for more easily navigating the page with arrow keys, or skipping to specific sections that you want to dig into - both things that are harder in the regular view or edit mores.
Page Preview
You can also preview your page before you publish changes. This is available in the more actions menu, or via or CMD/Ctrl+shift+E. This lets you see what it looks like, and gives you a chance to change things before you commit to them. I use this fairly frequently as I want to see how macros and other formatting look on the page. Another way you could do this is just to publish the page - however - this will result in the page history updating to include that new “version”. This can quickly clutter things up and make it harder to keep track of whats the “real” version vs. something you were just playing around with.
Page History
One feature I do use very frequently is the ability to view a pages version history. Confluence keeps track of EVERY change to a page,.meaning you can, at any time (as long as you have the edit permission) see every change ever made to a page. You can even compare two different versions, and restore old ones if you need to.
Typically I find myself using this to see what’s changed since I last viewed a page (although if you have Atlassian Intelligence you’ll have the ability to compare drafts via AI, which does the heavy lifting for you!). That said I do find myself restoring older versions fairly frequently as I realized I’ve made a mistake or need to roll back something.
One thing to be aware of is that you can delete entries in the version history (check out the note below for why this may be an issue). Personally I don’t find many uses for this - other than removing older versions of policies to ensure folks can’t track the changes, or removing “extra” versions I’ve accidentally added by publishing a page too early. If you delete a version it’s gone forever, and the number will update to reflect that (e.g. if I delete v3 above, the current version will become version 3).
Note - Page history is usually not robust enough to meet specific audit requirements (e.g. versions can be deleted), so if you’re looking for a way to maintain audit history or become compliant with various frameworks you may need a specific add one that helps.
