Pages and Basic Editing - ACA-920 Confluence Essentials

Pages are the basic building block of Confluence and what many of us think of when we think of Confluence. They’re basically Word or Google docs and allow us to create a wide range of information that we can easily share with users.

Page Creation

An important thing to remember is that pages are created under whichever page you have open. This means if you make a page while you’re viewing the home page, it will get dropped at the bottom of the Hierarchy under the home page. If you make a page under one called “design” it will automatically become a child of Design.

This confused me for years…

And is why I don’t like that “+Create” button that’s at the top of everything! I find it much too easy to forget where I’m at and make a page under some random bit of content. That said, it does create the page. My preferred method is to use the “+” buttons in the Hierarchy as I know exactly where the new page is going (under the page I clicked the “+” next to.

Pages can be created in a few ways, but most commonly folks use the “Create+” button that’s clearly visible at the top of Confluence (and basically impossible to lose!). Personally this isn’t my favourite way of creating pages - mostly because when I started using Confluence I started using the “+” button in the Content Hierarchy… but also because it can be easy to “lose” a page when you create it this way.

Child Pages

A great feature of pages is they can be nested under other pages. This allows you to quickly organize content visually, making it much easier for folks to browse through what you’ve created. For example, you can nest all the “Policies” under the “Policy” page. This makes it easier for content creation (since folks know where to put something) and content consumers (since they can find stuff). There’s no known upper limit to the number of layers, but best practice is to limit this to no more than 4 levels to keep things manageable.

Editing Options

After you create a page you’ll see the editing menu, which includes a number of features to help you make content. One important thing to note is that you cannot change the font or text size! Instead, you can change the Text Style - mainly to various headers. I initially found it annoying that you can’t change fonts or sizes, however, it does simplify things (no more “serif” or “sans-serif” arguments!). Headers also serve an important function - they act as links on the page. This lets you easily hyperlink a specific header to someone, or, even better, connect it to various macros (we’ll dig into them more in a future session).

There are some other text options, like bold, italics, strikethrough and color that you can access, along with building lists and indents. The final section (“The good stuff”) contains options for things like adding hyperlinks (you can just CMD+V over text if you’ve copied a link to hyperlink it), insert images and attachments, and include things like layouts and emojis.

Templates

Templates are pre-formatted pages that make it much easier to quickly create (and consume!) content. Confluence comes preloaded with 140+, but Space Admins can also add and edit these to fit your specific needs. I highly recommend you review what templates you have, and then work with your Space Admin to modify as needed.

You can also search through templates, or easily browse with the categories - something I never knew!

Atlassian Intelligence

Atlassian Intelligence (or AI… see what they did there?) is included in Cloud Premium and higher and offers a number of different options to use AI to help improve writing and summarize pages. Personally I mainly use it to summarize things since I’m (sometimes) too lazy to read, but it does offer some great built-in options to leverage AI to speed things ups.

Wrap Up

Our next session is March 28th at 6 AM PDT and covers Advanced Editing- I look forward to seeing you there, and check out the recording from this session below!