Templates Are Your Friend
I’ve created a lot of Confluence content. Sometimes the content I’m creating is unique, or at least uncommon. More often than not, though, the content I’m creating is similar to something else I”ve already done. How-to pages. Policies. Meeting notes. The list goes on.
Earlier in my career I found myself creating all that content from a blank page - it is, after all, the first thing you see when you click create. While this gave me a blank canvas to work on, I quickly found it to be time consuming to add the same formatting options, or macros, or headers time after after. It can also be a bit daunting to stare at that relatively blank space and get started.
A fix
So, I stole a trick I used in other systems - copy and paste! Just open up another page that looked like the one I wanted to build, copy everything and paste it on my new, blank page. This worked… However, it required that I go over the copy and remove anything that related to the page I was copying from. At best this resulted in me taking more time than I would prefer, at worst I’d miss something and leave incorrect information on a page (not the end of the world, but annoying and embarrassing!).
This process of copy, paste, edit, write continued for a while, until someone pointed out Templates existed. I’m honestly not sure how or why I didn’t use them before, but once I did I got a lot faster at creating solid content.
Managing Templates
The sheer number of available templates is a bit staggering, so I quickly found it worth my time to manage them a bit:
Use the search bar and filter options - You can certainly scroll through the 100+ templates in confluence… but that takes time. Instead, just use the search bar at the top (or the filter options) to quickly pare down the list.
Star favorites - Starring favorites makes it much easier to locate and it only takes a few seconds to do. Typically I find myself only using a handful of templates (even including new ones I’ve made), so doing this is more than worthwhile.
Remove them - If you’re really feeling up for it, go into space settings and remove unnecessary templates. Personally I find I don’t do this since it takes a bit of time, but many of the templates displayed never get used, so just rip them out.
Edit existing ones - Sometimes you’ll find a template that doesn’t QUITE meet your needs… don’t suffer through editing it every time you want to use it - instead go edit the template in space settings. This ensures every time you use it, it will be exactly what you need.
Make new ones - While the 100+ stock templates can be useful, you will likely find you have a specific need they don’t meet. Take some time to make your own template the fits your exact use case. This does take a bit of time, but it will both save you time constantly editing new pages, and also remove the mental burden or worrying about that time spent.
Other benefits
I’ve found that taking time to manage templates in a space doesn’t just help me, it helps everyone else creating content. Many folks I talk to mention formatting and not knowing how to setup a page as being a hurdle to making content, so by cleaning up templates and making them more useful to your team you’ll be helping knock down barriers to entry.
