How to do ghost writing on Confluence Cloud Blogs

[Abby Anetsberger]

Hello, 

Our company has a use-case where we need the ability for a ghost-writer to author a page or blog and then publish it as a different Confluence User (e.g. Executive communications). 

We used to use a ghost-writing plugin in Data Center, but I've been unable to find an alternative for Cloud. 

I ran some tests of the "change owner" feature in Cloud, but the limitation is that we can only "change owner" on a Page - not on a Blog. Our biggest use case for ghost writing is going to be for Exec Blog content so we need the ability to "change owner" or ghost write on Blogs. I also tried the option to create a page, then do "change owner" on the page, then update the page and use the "Publish as Blog" feature, but when I do that it reverts the owner back to me.. 

Does anyone have a workaround or suggestion for how to ghost-write Blogs in Confluence Cloud? 

[Valerie Knapp]

Hi @Abby Anetsberger , welcome to the Atlassian Community and thanks for your question.

You should be able to do this with Refined - https://help.refined.com/space/CLOUDDOCS/5152309288/Authors+on+Confluence+pages+and+blog+posts 

I appreciate there is a cost to using an app for this, and not the standard functionality. You can reach out to the vendor directly if you have any other questions about what is possible - https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1221322/refined-sites-for-confluence-intranets-documentation-kbs?hosting=cloud&tab=support 

Best wishes

[Zoriana Bogutska_Adaptavist_]

Hi @Abby Anetsberger 

As one of the workarounds, you can try adding a card with the author of the content. It will help you to highlight who the real author is, no matter who published or edited that page.

If you don't have access to Confluence premium feature cards and/or need to make them branded, you can try Mosaic advanced cards, which I used in the screenshot.   

Let me know if you have any questions about Mosaic, it was created by my team.

[Kristian Klima]

Hi @Abby Anetsberger 

Blog shows the creator, not the owner, if I'm not mistaken.

So even if you change the owner, the blog will display the creator.

A workaround would be get the exec to create a bunch of empty blogs (or pages as the page can be converted to a blog). If they have their own space, which they probably do, it should be fairly straightforward.

Other than that, you can work with an app that puts a skin over your Confluence (Refined, Spacecraft, Aura, Mantra) or create a website from Confluence content (Scroll Viewport, Instant Websites).

Support for blogs may vary across these apps but they're chaning constantly. Also, a blog is a page with fewer options so nothing stops you from creating a section, calling it Blog and use regular pages.