Creating different views of a page

[Daryl Krzewinski]

Very new to Confluence, but I couldn't find a specific use case like mine, so thought I'd ask. If this question has come up before feel free to point me to an answer already given.

I am creating a Confluence site with 3 different "persona" access levels. The point of this is that one will be "developer" level, with all of the nuts and bolts and details, while the other two will be progressively higher-level users, each with accordingly less detail.

It goes without saying that maintaining three different pages that overlap a lot is undesirable, so my thinking is creating the lowest-level pages one time, then marking different sections as visible (or not) to the higher levels, so an executive less interested in detail has a different view that "hides" the nuts and bolts stuff (for example), but shows roadmaps, milestones, etc.

Also, these will be "living" pages, updated frequently by the various technical managers, so the ability to have them update one page one time and the changes auto-perpetuate through other views is highly desirable.

Is what I am asking feasible?

[Michael Andolfatto · Accepted solution]

Hi @Daryl Krzewinski , welcome to the Community!

 The "views" that you're asking for don't exactly exist in Confluence- access is determined on two principles:

1. Permissions - A user or group has access to a Confluence "space" when they are added to that space's permission scheme. At this level, they can be granted view access, edit access, etc. (to all content within the space)
2. Restrictions - Restrictions sit on individual pages or a hierarchy of pages. I can say that only specific users can see a page and all of its children, but I can't selectively choose what content on that page is hidden

What you can do to partially meet your requirement is use the Excerpt and Excerpt Include macros. Putting content within an Excerpt macro makes it retrievable in other pages, keeping a single source of truth.

Through this structure, you can have developers maintain the details and keep a separate "overview/high-level" page which only pulls in the content you want your stakeholders to see.

More about these macros can be found here: 

• Insert the excerpt macro | Confluence Cloud | Atlassian Support
• Insert the excerpt include macro | Confluence Cloud | Atlassian Support

[Daryl Krzewinski]

Thank you Michael for the detailed response. I am reading up on and working to use these now.

I had hoped to have something like a landing page where you could select "Developer,' "Tech Lead" or "Executive" and navigate to your desired view that way. I know this can be done manually with a tree structure, but like I had said from the start, wanted the managers to edit one truth page only, with the other views updating only.

It sounds like I can kind of "fake" that structure using Excerpt and Excerpt Include, but might be limited to two "views" only?

[Michael Andolfatto]

@Daryl Krzewinski - You could probably achieve something similar to this with a little upkeep. This solution assumes that if a page with an Excerpt macro is Restricted that the content is still able to be shown elsewhere via the Excerpt Include macro. I have not tested this but this looks to be the behaviour experienced from some other posts I've come across.

Proposal:

• Three pages that sit at the same hierarchy level. One for developers, one for managers, one for executives (or whatever your three levels are)
• Through Atlassian's user/group management, have three groups created for the same roles
• Add the people fitting each role into the correct groups. If you have Atlassian Access this can be set automatically whenever a new user account for your claimed domain(s) is provisioned
• Restrict each of the parent page's visibility to the respective group. This will automatically hide the parent page and all children from anyone not belonging to these groups

It brushes on your original idea of maintaining three pages which is of course not ideal but using the Excerpt macros you hopefully won't need to duplicate work. Some configuration will be needed when creating each page hierarchy, but after that all content should display fine and be able to be edited from a single source of truth.