Custom status labels: what's their function?

[Gwen]

Hi I couldn't find any documentation about this.
I'm wondering what the function of the custom status labels is, aka what you get by pressing /status on a page.
Are they simply cosmetic or do they have a specific case of use?

Thanks.

[Brita Moorus · Accepted solution]

Hi @Gwen! 👋

Great question! The custom status labels you get from typing /status in Confluence are mostly visual indicators - they're perfect for showing things like In progress, Approved, or Needs review right on a page.

While they’re mainly cosmetic, they can be super useful when used in tables, meeting notes, or with the Page Properties macro. That way, you can build dynamic overviews or dashboards that display statuses across multiple pages. Really handy for tracking documentation progress or project phases!

Hope this helps! ✨

[Barbara Szczesniak · Accepted solution]

Hi, @Gwen 

I use these as a visual indicator. In our software, we have about 15 different roles that users might have, so I use a Status macro in the documentation in the following ways:

• at the top of a page, I have a panel macro with a title of Applies to: followed by each of the roles involved in anything on that page. Roles for internal users are 1 color, main customer users another color, vendor users another color, etc.
• within a page, where a section of text or procedure steps applies to a subset of the users mentioned at the top of the page, I just copy the relevant role indicator (status macro) from the top of the page. I also do this within a paragraph to draw attention when mentioning a specific user type.

I have also added custom statuses for my space (Space settings > General > Avatars and status) to use as an indicator of the page status, since I wanted different ones to the defaults.

[Gwen]

Mmh, in my case, I'm using them for scene writing, indicating locations, and place in the global timeline.

Does that mean I could retrieve this information in a table? Such as:

TIME ----- SCENE ------------- EXCERPT ---------------------------- LINK

Present -- "MC dies" ---------- MC gets killed by archenemy ------ http://url.com

D+1 ----- "MC is back" ------- MC is resurrected thanks to dude -- http://url2.com

Present and D+1 being my custom status labels.

[Barbara Szczesniak]

I'm not sure. When I wanted to create a page for each role with links to the pages that applied, I found that you could not do this with the statuses—only with labels. 

What you want to do sounds like it might work better with a Confluence database. There have been many articles and discussions in the community about this topic. One place to start might be: https://community.atlassian.com/forums/Confluence-Databases-articles/Intro-to-Confluence-Databases-webinar-follow-up/ba-p/2964653 

There is a link to the webinar at the bottom of this article.

[Rebekka Heilmann (viadee)]

Hi @Gwen and welcome to the Community,

when they were introduced they were purely informative and for the human eye. However, you could always access the page status by API and some Marketplace Apps are using it for their functionality.

Nowadays, you can use the status in Automations, for instance: Notify someone, when page status is changed. Using Confluence databases, you could also create an overview of pages, show details and their status and change the status right from the DB entry.

It's sort of a light version of Marketplace Apps like Comala, where there is an actual workflow for publishing and approving pages/changes.

[Elena Cantero]

Hi @Gwen and @Rebekka Heilmann _viadee_  :) 

My name is Elena and I a Product Manager at Appfire, responsible for apps such as Comala Document Management and Comala Publishing for Confluence Cloud (the ones mentioned above).

If you'd like to know about these apps and whether they can solve your business case and needs, please do not hesitate to set up a meeting with me.

Hope we can chat soon.

Thanks!

Elena Cantero
Product Manager
Appfire

[Levente Szabo _Midori_]

@Gwen

As mentioned before, Confluence page status can play a super important role in an automated content lifecycle management strategy, triggering notification emails for stale content or automatically archiving or deleting pages.

One thing you run into when looking more into built-in statuses is that there are only 5 of them that can be used globally (are 5 statuses enough for you? It's not for many use cases.) and custom statuses are not visible, only for you (unless you ask everyone else to create exactly the same statuses and use them the same way).

Here is a comprehensive article on how you can up your Confluence page status game by

1. Introducing universal statuses that all team members can use
2. Having them refresh automatically based on your rules
3. Building custom automations to notify folks or archive pages when status conditions are met
4. Collect and display pages using the Content Status List macro, like this:

(I'm part of the Midori team, developing the Better Content Archiving and Analytics since 2008.)