Version UI a la Confluence documentation

[Robert Lauriston]

How do you implement a version UI like the one in Confluence's documentation, which has a little menu in the upper-left corner? Can you set it up to reuse topics that have not changed from one version to the next?

All Versions

Confluence 4.0.x
Confluence 3.5.x
Confluence 3.4.x
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[Edwin Dawson · Accepted solution]

Hi there, as Joe mentioned this is achieved by customising the Confluence Documentation Theme.

Details for how to do this are listed under step 4 on this page:

http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Creating+your+Technical+Documentation+Space

In the case of Confluence.atlassian.com, we are including a page from another space for the list of versions. For example, the Confluence documentation includes this simple page into the left nav:

http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/ALLDOC/_All+Versions+of+Confluence+Documentation

You could customise the navbar to contain more or less anything you wanted, certainly a list of page titles wouldn't be too difficult. It could simply be a list of links on a basic page as in the example above.

[Robert Lauriston]

Do you reuse unchanged pages across release versions, so that if you found an error that applied to 3.4, 3.5, and 4.0 you could correct it once and all three would be updated?

[SarahA]

Hallo Robert

No, we don't do that. It would become quite difficult to manage, unless the wiki provided some fairly sophisticated branching functionality similar to a source control tool. We keep the documentation for each major version in a separate space. On the whole, we maintain the space for the current release only, although occasionally we do update the archive spaces (for previous versions) when someone reports an error in the documentation, or an important workaround that needs noting.

Cheers, Sarah

[Robert Lauriston]

How about integrating a source control tool to handle branching?

[Joe Clark]

There is a configuration option in the Confluence Documentation Theme that allows you to customise the contents of the sidebar - this is accessible in the space administration section when the documentation theme is selected.

I'll see if I can get one of our tech writers to post an answer here describing how they achieved it on confluence.atlassian.com.