Organize your spaces

Owned by Sami Jaatinen
Jan 16, 2017
3 min read

 

Here's a few tips that'll help you organize your space so that everyone can find what they're looking for and stay on top of what's important to them.

 

 

How do I organize content within my space? 

Pages and blogs

Everything you create in Confluence, from meeting notes to retrospectives and everything in between, takes the form of either pages or blogs.

 

  • Your homepage will be the first thing that visitors to your site see, so to help them find relevant content, start by curating your homepage with useful macros and including information about what is in your space. See Create an awesome homepage for more information.

  • If you're creating content that is specific mainly to the current time­frame, and isn't going to change over time, create it as a blog post. Your blog displays as an infinite scroll, so it surfaces the latest news and visitors just need to scroll down if they're interested in older content.

  • If you're creating content that you want to last, and possibly evolve over time, then create it as a page. Pages nest, so every page can have its own child pages, which lets you organize your content into categories and subcategories.

Configure the sidebar

You can customize your space sidebar to make it easier to navigate through your space.

  • The space shortcuts section of the sidebar lets you link to important content. You can use this to highlight pertinent pages within your space, related content from other spaces, or to external content that is relevant to your space.

  • The navigation display lists all of the pages in your space in either a page tree or child pages format. If you only want some content to be visible in the sidebar, you can hide the navigation display and put the pages you want to remain visible under Space shortcuts instead.

Using labels

Labels are keywords or tags that you can add to pages, blog posts, and attachments. 

  • Define your own labels and use them to categorize, identify, or bookmark content in Confluence. For example, if you assign the label 'accounting' to all accounts ­related pages on your site, you'll then be able to: 
    1. Browse all pages with that label in a single space or across the site.
    2. Display a list of pages with that label.
    3. Search based on that label.
  • Use the Organize your spaces to create a table of contents for your space that is organized by label categories. 

  • Labels aren't exclusive, so you can have as many labels as you want on a page. The page will then appear under each of those categories. See Organize your spaces  for more information.

 

How do I keep my space tidy?  

If you have lots of people creating in the same space, things can get messy fast. You can prevent this by taking a few easy steps.

 

Create a set of guidelines

  • Let your collaborators know about what parent pages to create their child pages under, so no content gets lost or misplaced.  

  • Decide on standard labels to add to pages, blogs, and attachments so all content gets neatly categorized.

  • Add a link to this in the Space Shortcuts section of the sidebar so that it's easy to find.

 

Use page blueprints

Organize your spaces are templates that come with formatting, macros and sample content. You can customize these Blueprints for each space.

Everything created from a Blueprint will have it's own index in the sidebar, so for example if you use the Organize your spaces, you can select 'Meeting Notes' in the sidebar to see a list of all the meeting notes in your space.

Create your own page templates

Create your own templates for any content that you want formatted the same way every time. For example, if you have to create a regular report tracking the same criteria, create a template with headings, variable dates, tables, and spaces for any graphics, so that each time all you have to do is input the new data instead of creating the whole report from scratch.