How can I export unpublished changes?

[Michael Witten]

We want to have a work flow for one of our confluence spaces that will require an approval from a partner before the changes go live. I think the best way to do this would be to make unpublished changes and export them as a pdf and email them for approval and once approved publish the changes. However, I can not work out how to export the page as is with unpublished changes, is this possible? I see that when you preview changes you don't get any of those options.

[James Dellow · Accepted solution]

If you are trying to do this without using 3rd-party workflow apps for Confluence, I would suggest making a copy of the page first, then make the changes. The only issue is updating the original, because there is no out of the box method to merge the copy back into the original - you could either copy & paste or move / rename the pages around, so the copy replaces the original in the space.

[Michael Witten]

OK, so seems this is not a feature in Confluence. We may just have to not use it for this part of the business as that makes the work flow pretty bad. Is it a feature that could be added maybe? I can't imagine it would be too hard to do considering you can already do a preview, just need to add the export options in there. In the meantime I may try find a way around this or another app that has this support.

[James Dellow]

Remember that Confluence is an enterprise wiki, not a content management system - so the idea is not to have workflow (but it does have a history of changes and the ability to rollback changes). However, there are apps in the marketplace that add workflow capabilities to Confluence if you need it. But yes, you might also be able to build your own customisation to do this. I've never tried it, but I believe it is possible to get draft pages via the API.

[Michael Witten]

Yeh,  realize its not a CMS and does not have workflow, this would be the one area we would be looking at any approvals, I figured it would be easiest just to be able to print out a page with unpublished changes as we could send it to whoever we need then. I may have a look into the API, but I am guessing this will still take a lot of work just to export a pdf (considering Confluence can already do this on published pages).

Of course the other option is to do the preview and just print from the browser to a PDF. It won't be formatted as nicely as if you used confluence to do it (will have the entire interface etc), but will be a quick and easy solution.