Mastering Dynamic Contents

If you have decided to collect and organize all company information on Confluence, you will need to master some skills. The foremost of these is the ability to use dynamic pages effectively.

Pages whose content is automatically updated according to specific rules or contain rich content other than text and images are called dynamic pages. They interact with other pages on Confluence.

By making the pages dynamic, you can easily organize your knowledge base and find what you seek. Dynamic pages interact with other pages in the environment, and this way, you can reuse content from one page to another.

In this chapter, you will learn how to make static pages dynamic. You can be sure that what you learn here will greatly benefit you.

We will cover the following topics in this chapter:

• Labeling pages
• Getting to know the macros
• Exploring macros that use labels
• Discovering macros that interact with pages
• Adding more macros to Confluence...

Technical requirements

You will need the following software and requirements to complete this chapter:

• An up-to-date web browser
• An active subscription to Confluence Cloud Premium

Labeling pages

You can add one or more labels to a Confluence page. With these labels, you can make the pages dynamic. In addition, thanks to the labels, you can effortlessly find the specific page you are looking for in an environment with hundreds or thousands of pages. For example, you can filter pages that have a specific label. You can also utilize filters while searching.

You can see the page’s labels at the bottom of that page. You can assign one or more previously created labels to the page. However, you can also add a brand new label to a page. When you do this, a new label is created. This label can also be used on other pages within your Confluence site. This way, your newly created label will be available for other spaces too.

We suggest that you follow these practices:

• Give multiple labels to each page.
• Set a standard rule for naming the labels – for example, my-first-label or my-second-label.
• Remember that there is no way to manage...

Getting to know macros

Adding a macro is one of the most effective ways to make dynamic Confluence pages. By adding one or more macros to a page, we can make that page dynamic. In other words, macros serve to make pages much more resourceful. Confluence offers us many macros for different purposes. In this and the following sections, we’ll examine macros closely.

Adding a macro to a page is easy. First, we want to teach you this skill. Next, we’ll go over the macros one by one.

Let’s see how we can add a macro to a page following these steps:

1. Open the sample page we created in the previous section or create a new one.
2. Click the Edit button to switch to edit mode.
3. Click the + button on the far right of the top menu and look at the options. The screen should look like this:

Figure 5.4 – Inserting a macro

We can also type / on a page to find macros.

4. As you can see, many macros can be added to the...

Adding macros to Confluence

It is possible to add macros to Confluence. There are two ways to do this – the first is to add a macro through the Atlassian Marketplace, and the other is to develop your macro from scratch. In this section, we will share practical information about both options.

Adding macros via the Atlassian Marketplace

You can find many Confluence macros on the Atlassian Marketplace, and you can upload the ones you like to your environment and start using them immediately. The following are a few recommendations that will be useful when evaluating macros:

• Make sure that you trust the producer of the macro
• Make sure that the macro is sufficient for information security
• Atlassian puts so much effort into ensuring that the content on this platform is world-class, but remember – the primary responsibility here is yours

Develop a new macro

You may want to develop your macro for various reasons. Maybe you couldn’t find...

Discovering Smart Links

In this section, we will discuss Smart Links, a relatively new feature. Smart Links make integrating a Confluence page with other systems straightforward. By using Smart Links, viewing content from supported programs as if you were inside the Confluence page is possible. For example, you can safely add a Miro visual to a Confluence page. Smart Links allow you to work with other programs without using any plugins. They are also very effective in making Confluence pages dynamic if used well. This is why we recommend you experiment a lot with Smart Links.

Smart Links is a new feature. While there was no Smart Links feature, we used to use plugins downloaded from the Atlassian Marketplace or develop software from scratch for such integrations. Smart Links have largely made these plugins and software development efforts unnecessary.

Smart Links work on the following principle – when you add a link to a Confluence page, the content where that link goes...

Summary

In this chapter, we gained significant experience with Confluence. First, we talked about dynamic content. We’ve seen different ways to make pages dynamic. We learned the concept of labels, the purpose of labels, and how they are used. Then, we covered macros. We saw the basic logic of macros, and then we examined the selected macros individually. Finally, we discovered different ways to enrich Confluence’s rich macro library.

Thanks to what you have learned in this chapter, you can comfortably carry out the work in the following parts of the book. In the next chapter, you will learn how to manage a software development project using Confluence by applying the concepts we've seen here.

Questions

1. What are the macros that use labels?
2. Explain the Related Labels macro.
3. Explain the Content Report Table macro.
4. Can more macros be added to Confluence? How?
5. Explain Smart Links.

Answers

1. Related Labels, Content by Label, Labels List, Popular Labels, and Content Report Table.
2. This macro fetches labels from other pages that share a label with the page the macro was added to. Thus, it allows you to list the related labels on your page.
3. You can use this macro to report pages with a specific label in a table.
4. Yes. You can add new macros to Confluence via Atlassian Marketplace.
5. Using Smart Links, viewing the contents from supported programs as if they were inside the Confluence page is possible. For example, you can safely add a Miro visual to a Confluence page. Smart Links allow you to work with other programs without using any plugins.