Do you use parent pages heavily? The Confluence team wants to talk to you!

[#1]

Hi everyone,

My name's Ned, and I'm a product manager on Confluence working on organization & navigation. Right now, we're in the midst of thinking deeply about how our top customers organize their spaces — more specifically, how they use parent pages, as well as the pros and cons of parent pages versus more traditional container types used in other products.

If you use parent pages heavily at your customer or have opinions to share on the above, then I'd love to chat with you! 

Please book any time here that's convenient for you.

Thanks!

Ned

[Keith Sottung]

Hello,  I just signed up. 

Here is my take/concerns/thoughts on parent pages...

I come at this with the idea of leveraging Confluence for 2 solutions.  My organization develops software or some kind of business solution that uses software.  For any business, they will need to write up how a user should use the software.  Or how a Trainer should teach out t use the software. 

When using confluence to create manuals (user or training) you will want to leverage the Export to PDF, not just at the page level but the space level.  (export selected pages and have the pdf export create a custom TOC.) 

Parent Pages can both be helpful to the export to pdf option or an obstacle. Often when a parent page is created, a display child page macro is added.  The question is how does that help? It might if the user is "drill navigating" to find information. It doesn't help if the need is to create and custom manual using the Space export to PDF. It creates an un-necessary page of information in the exported pdf. 

The parent page too, also creates addition search result when a user it looking to find information.

Parent pages are left over thought concepts from "file and folder" methodology. :-( But how to purge this from Confluence is not clear.  The visiting user needs structure, I get that.   

The other method is to Pre-fix category names to each page, which ends up creating longer page titles.  E.g. "Accounting - Account Payable - How to set new payment terms?"  

Hope I made clear the choices around Parent or no Parent - Looking for to the conversation. 

[Chris Buzon]

Hey Ned!

When you say Parent pages, what specifically do you mean?  Are you asking if people just place pages at the 'top' level vs using child/parent pages?  
I use a lot of parent pages, often combined with the include page macro, or with the tile-image to create a sort of visual shortcut to specific spaces or content, but I am not sure if you mean that sort of thing, or something else.

Chris

[Keith Sottung]

@Chris Buzon since you use a lot of parent pages... question: How do u prevent others from re-order you pages around? I find heavy use of parent pages require the page tree has to be static. Confluence does not safe guard the page structure. 

[Liz Burns]

Hi, Ned! I do make use of the Parent-Child page functionality and also do a heck of a lot of Excerpt/Page includes so nothing falls through the cracks, just in case someone messes with the organization of our Space's tree structure. 

If there something new coming down the road, and that's why you're asking? Just anticipating the workload just in case. 

And back in the long-ago-far-away time, didn't Atlassian call them Collector pages?

[Rita Nygren]

I use page restrictions a good deal, and by parent I just mean the top page in a hierarchical structure that has some restrictions on it (as opposed to the space home page).  Is this what you mean?

[Kelsey Easterbrooks]

Hi Ned, I am newer to Confluence and have been using (mainly empty) parent pages as folders for the most part. Would prefer to just put categories of notes into folders within each space. Thanks!

[Andy Gladstone]

Signed up. Eager to share my thoughts and hear the insight of others.

[Ned Lindau]

WOW! Thanks for the incredible response. I'm slated to chat with 12 folks over the next two weeks, so closing my calendar for now, but will definitely reach back out for more feedback in the future.

I'm continually in awe of this community and all of your passion for improving Atlassian products.

THANK YOU!

Ned

[Hopkins, Kenyon]

We mainly use Confluence for support documents surrounding processes and applications. Confluence would lose most of its value for us if we couldn't have parent/children pages. That being said, if whatever replaced it gave us similar functionality or better, then progress is good thing. 

[Ned Lindau]

@Hopkins, Kenyon thanks! If you were to design the ideal container within a space, how would it differ from what exists today (parent pages)?

[Hopkins, Kenyon]

Reply To: "Ned Lindau ATLASSIAN TEAM Feb 21, 2024

@Hopkins_ Kenyon thanks! If you were to design the ideal container within a space, how would it differ from what exists today (parent pages)?"

Nest the pages however it suits your code and call it whatever you like but we love it just the way it is. 2 levels of nav - Parent & Child. Can use macros from the parent page (and again on children pages if we want) to go directly to specific topic/subtopic that the reader is looking for wherever it is in the family. If I were to complain about anything, it would be what others have echoed about converting the pages to PDF's. We occasionally have to email PDFs of the page which can get ugly depending on the elements we used in the page. Any other complaint I have would be out of scope for your question.

[Matt]

Our org uses parent pages a lot for hierarchal structure purposes but almost more important is the use of parent/child pages to apply page restrictions.

[Anne-Sophie G]

Hi Ned, 

The way it works now fits us well. My colleagues regularly complain that they feel lost in SharePoint, because SharePoint folder structure prevents them to see at a glance what's in a SharePoint library.

Our parent pages focus on big topics, to help navigation and context introduction. Children pages contain smaller details, meeting notes, ... The parent pages are either empty containers, or contain high-level text explanations and visuals.

We don't have templates for our parent pages, except for the space home pages.

We don't mind that pages can be easily moved up and down in the page tree. 

-

A change that would be appreciated, is that when you are reading a parent page and the left side bar is closed, you don't see the children pages. I've tried educating my colleagues about the beauty of the Child Pages macro, but it would be nice to automatically see the children pages in the page breadcrumb somehow.

An ugly mockup below... For instance, this parent page "Employee Handbooks" has 10 children pages. It would be nice for Confluence to show a hint that there are things down there - and if I click on the "10" I'd see the list of children in a small menu. It would help navigation:

[John Fox]

Hello Ned - I and my organization are heavy users of deeply nested page organizations in Confluence. We have some spaces with thousands of pages nested as much as 20 levels deep. I was directed here by the Support person working an issue I recently had regarding large and deeply-nested content: JST-962118

I'd be happy to share more information about the way I and my organization organize content on Confluence if that would help your effort.

[Kristján Geir Mathiesen]

Hi @Ned Lindau  Let me know if you want to talk to more folks.  KGM

[Guess, Brandi N.]

My team.recently went on a new space spree which caused me to turn of users ability to make a space. Our humble team of about 15 users had 6 separate spaces ( not including our personal space obviously) 

I said no, absolutely not this is ridiculous to have a space with just a couple pages.

So I took all the overview pages and put them.onto parent pages, then any content they had I nested appropriately under their designated parent page. 

I then crated "buttons" which is just a layout with notes in them where the text is linked to the parent pages. 

It would be nice if this were a little simpler. Our organization of whoms Confluence I manage. Has less than 100 people, in my head broken up by what they do I can think of 6 use cases for communal spaces. They had over 30 when I took my position, and I have us down to 18. 

My answer back honestly is why does Atlassian sell the idea of every project / team getting its own space, when the teams can have a space for which they keep projects, or teams and keep them under parent pages for each project.