Monthly Archive for January, 2008

I’m working with Confluence to create a wiki for travel agents can record their research holidays. It is hoped that their colleagues can use first hand experiences of the resorts to promote them.

We wanted to have an easy and structured way for people to add pages, for which we’re using Confluence’s templates feature. Templates allow a two step page creation process:

1. Enter information into a structured form (e.g. in our hotel page template, we ask for information on the food, accomodation and view), and select “insert variables” (I know, awful button title).
2. Review what you’ve entered on the standard Confluence edit page (all the information from the form fields will have been inserted at the relevant points in the page).

A great piece of functionality but too many clicks involved. To create a templated page you have to:

1. Click into the space administration section (already not ideal for a “regular” staff member)
2. Select space templates from the menu
3. Find the template you want
4. Finally, select “create page from template”

With some technical jiggery-pokery I’ve managed to get this process down to one click, “create hotel page”, and I’ve done this without cracking into Java code (which is the programming language Confluence is written in). Continue reading ‘Confluence links to create pages from templates’