Yayyy! Confluence wiki has page ordering
It’s a great week for technical documentation on a wiki. Confluence 2.8 is out and it includes manual page ordering. The technical writers at Atlassian have been vocal lobbyists for this feature for quite a while. I’m sure that many people who voted for the feature are technical writers too.
When you’re writing a documentation set, the sequence of the pages and chapters is very meaningful. It’s nice… well, many would argue that it’s essential to be able to define a logical page order rather than being stuck with an alphabetical order. Up to now in Confluence, we’ve worked around the problem by manually adding chapter numbers and page numbers, like “1. Introduction”, “2. Installation Guide”, “2.1 System Requirements”, and so on. Now take a look at point 2 in the Confluence 2.8 Release Notes. We can just drag and drop the pages and chapters where we want them. They stay there 
and the new order is reflected in the PDF outputs and hierarchical page-tree views. Magic.
Here’s the page-ordering feature request on our JIRA issue tracker — it has 174 votes and 87 watchers (i.e. people who want automatic notification of any developments on the issue). The JIRA voting system certainly helped to get this particular feature into Confluence. It was a non-trivial change, and took a fair bit of effort from the development team.
A big hug for the Confluence team on behalf of technical writers everywhere ♥
Other Atlassians think the new version of the wiki is awesome too. See what Fag on FOSS has to say. There were a number of people involved in getting the release out there, and it’s cool that we’re all so pleased with it.
How are my trees doing?
It’s been a while since I ventured to the top of the garden to check up on my two trees. Some of you many have seen my first post about the trees, way back in August last year, when I planted the trees. Now they’ve been in the ground for eight months. They’re about the same age as this blog.
The Old Man Banksia is now 98cm high, grown from 17cm at planting:
The Prickly Paperbark has shot up to 172cm, from 40cm at planting. Its trunk is about the girth of my finger. As you can see, the garden around the Paperbark is a bit of a jungle, but the tree is holding its own:
Posted on 13 April 2008, in atlassian, Confluence, technical writing, trees, wiki and tagged atlassian, Banksia, Confluence, JIRA, page ordering, Paperbark, technical documentation, technical writing, trees, wiki, wikis. Bookmark the permalink. 6 Comments.
Hi Sarah. I’m a technical writer at National Instruments. I read your blog occasionally but since I wasn’t familiar with your company/product, I didn’t pay much attention to your product-specific posts.
Well, recently I was assigned the task of migrating our internal wiki page to a new wiki server and guess what? We’re using Confluence now! I’m not familiar with Confluence at all so I started reading the online user guide. I saw all the pages were edited by you and made the connection to your blog right away!
I find it very exciting to see the works of other technical writers I read about put to use! I like the way Confluence documentation is done within the wiki itself! Talk about using your own company product and eating your own dog food.
Anyway, we’re still using Confluence 2.7.1 so I don’t the page ordering feature you mentioned in this post.
When you get a chance, check out my blog. I’ll be writing a post soon about using Confluence!
Hallo Susan
It’s great to hear from you, and thank you for the positive comments about the Confluence docs
Like you, I really enjoy “meeting” other tech writers outside of the work sphere, even if it’s only a virtual meeting, and then finding that we have something in common apart from just tech writing itself. I hope you enjoy Confluence. I’ll be really interested to hear of your experiences with it. I’ve subscribed to your blog.
Actually, I had already read one of your posts — the one about a typical day as a tech writer in Shanghai. It’s a great read!
Seeya on the page,
Sarah
Hi Sarah,
There’s a plugin you can add to WordPress to allow your readers to subscribe to the comments of the post they just commented on. That way, readers can read yours or others followup comments.
http://txfx.net/code/wordpress/subscribe-to-comments/
I use this plugin and it works well, you can see a demo on my blog. I would not have known you replied my comment had I not revisit this post again.
Anyway, I will definitely give you more feedback as I explore Confluence. I am really liking the wiki-style documentation!
Hallo Susan
That looks like a great plugin. I’m using a hosted WordPress blog site, and the plugin doesn’t appear to be installed here. But I’ve added the RSS comment feed, so that people can subscribe to comments too, if they want to.
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