Confluence: Promote Global Templates (like blueprint templates)

[Gavin Fowler]

Hi I've a quick question.

I'm trying (without much success) to guide my user community use a Global (page) Template I've created as a preferred alternative for new page creation (rather than just the Confluence "Blank Page"). I've approached this from two angles:

1. Global Templates
2. BluePrint Template (custom plugin development)

Both solutions work in principle, but they both have compromising issues.

• Global Template:
  my Template is pretty much at the bottom of a list of page templates (in "create" page template selection dialog), even if I change the name to sort alphabetically higher. It seems the Default Page is always first. Blueprints are always secondary and Global Templates are tertiary (so my preferred template for new page is out of site in the template selection dialog)
• BluePrint Template:
  with this approach I had better success (I can use the promote blueprint feature of confluence 5.3 and higher) *but* blueprints seem to always create a space shortcut (which I can't seem to suppress): link to previous question raised on this subject.

Does any one have any suggestions? my thoughts were:

• Can I ditch both my approaches (global template / blueprint template) and modify the "blank page" template that ships with confluence?
• Can I promote Global Templates (as can be done with Blueprints). The Jira ticket that developed feature in confluence suggests this is possible (see last comment), but this doesn't appear to be the case for Global Templates, just Blueprint Templates?
• Can I suppress the creation of sidebar shortcuts (default theme) when my Blueprint is used (question raised here)

Thanks!

[James Rickards · Accepted solution]

Thanks for the link to the feature request @Sherif.

@Gavin, A messy workaround is to copy the global template into a space specific template, then promote the space specific version.

[Cedric DEVAUX]

Hi James,

I'm agree with this workaround but it's more longer to manage template than use global template, you must manage same template in several spaces (in my case more than 20 spaces).

And when you change your global template, you must remember modify the template into specific template.

[Jan Müller]

I also think it would be useful to allow to promote a global template on a per space basis. This is not possible as of Confluence 5.3.4

[Sherif Mansour]

"Can I promote Global Templates (as can be done with Blueprints)."

We have an open feature request for this: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-32450

"Can I suppress the creation of sidebar shortcuts (default theme) when my Blueprint is used"

No, not out-of-the-box. You would need some custom development to make that work.

[Anson Hoyt]

Added my vote. Thanks! Promote "Blank page" is a major need in using Blueprints because the large list is overload for new users, but having them is great for acclimated users.

[F]

Completely agree. Adding an option to be able to order blueprint template will be useful !

[EPS Software Engineering AG]

Hi Gavin,

Maybe our Add-on Page Tree Creator (PTC) could be a solution. It works a bit different than the Confluence blueprints / templates. The PTC-templates are based on normal confluence pages and can have entire page trees. Start the process by clicking a button or choosing the menu item, fill out the form and the page tree gets created.

In our case we almost never use the Confluence creation dialog. We create an entire page tree with a lot of PTC-Buttons, which are used to create new pages based on PTC-Templates. It is somewhat difficult to describe this.

So, try our Live Examples (no registration needed) and see how it works.

Marketplace link: Page Tree Creator.

Regards,
Stephan

[Gavin Fowler]

this looks very interesting - thanks for the heads up