1. Creating content

This one’s a no-brainer. The must fundamental thing you do in Confluence is create content you need to get work done. Here’s the fastest way to create content, without touching your mouse.

Create new content by pressing:

Then select what you want to create:

If you’re anything like me sometimes you don’t want the structure of a Confluence Blueprint or page template, instead you want the freedom of a blank page. No sweat.

Create a blank page by pressing:

2. Editing content

You’re not always creating content from scratch in Confluence. More often than not, you’re updating a page you’ve already created or contributing to someone else’s work. For that, there’s one key – e.

Edit an existing page by pressing:

3. Saving content

Finished making edits? There’s still no need to touch your mouse. You’re just two keystrokes away from publishing your changes to a page or adding a comment to a page.

Save edits and post comments to pages by pressing:

Using Windows or Linux? Just sub ‘⌘’ for ‘control’

4. Sharing content

There are times you need to make sure your team sees a particular page. There’s a shortcut for that too.

 Share pages with co-workers by pressing:

Then enter the names of co-workers or any email address:

5. Finding content

This one’s my favorite. It’s quick to find content – pages, blog posts, file attachments, and people – and navigate to other Confluence spaces using Quick Navigation.

Search for content by pressing:

Start typing to find what you’re looking for:

Shortcut for more shortcuts?

You bet. These are just 5 of the many shortcuts I use in Confluence every day to help me get my work done, faster.

View a complete list of keyboard shortcuts in Confluence by pressing:

What’s your favorite keyboard shortcut?

Try Confluence for FREE

This is a guest post from K15t Software, Atlassian Experts and makers of Scroll Office, Scroll Versions, Scroll PDF Exporter, and many other Confluence add-ons.

If you manage complex content in Confluence, Scroll Versions is a must-have add-on for keeping your Confluence instance organized. With it, you can manage concurrent versions of pages or product documentation in one space, enhance content-reuse, improve SEO, and now publish to an existing Confluence space!

We’ve taken all the customer feedback we’ve received since we launched Scroll Versions last year, and today we’re proud to announce what’s new in Scroll Versions 2.0.

Page Info Panel

Scroll Versions introduced the “Page Info Panel” and in Versions 2.0, we’ve overhauled it completely. Its primary function is still to select the working version in which you are making changes, but it now also provides all the important information you need to know about the current page, including:

• A list of all page versions
• Which variants of the page are available
• Where it has been reused
• Where it has been published

But the best thing: It’s fun to work with! We’ve incorporated the Atlassian Design Guidelines to give it an awesome look and feel. (My personal favorite: you can now double-click to expand and collapse the page info panel.)

Variant Management

Variant Management is especially important when you need to document slightly different variations of the same product or service. It’s necessary to define which content is relevant, in the right context, to the right users.

So we allow you to get content attributes at the page level or within pages (using the new Conditional Content macro), and variants define which attributes are required to make the content relevant to a variant.

See the Variant Management feature in action:

Ever since the initial release we’ve been heads down making improvements to the Confluence Blueprints experience. Here are two of the many improvements available to Confluence OnDemand customers today:

1. Add viewing restrictions to your File Lists

The File List Blueprint makes it easy to create a list of files that teams need to get their work done. You can use File Lists to give all your employees one place to find approved company graphics and logos, download the latest version of sales and marketing presentations, and store all documents related to a particular project. Features like drag-and-drop file sharing, automatic versioning, instant previews, and full-text search make for a powerful case to ditch your shared network drive.

While making files and documents more accessible and easier to find will undoubtedly boost your team’s productivity, there are times when you need to restrict the viewing of certain files to individual co-workers or groups. Now you can.

2. Define custom page titles and location for new pages

Blueprints are more than page templates. When you create a page using a Blueprint, Confluence automatically organizes your Meeting Notes, File Lists, and Product Requirements in each space under ‘index pages’. Automatically generated Space Shortcuts in the Space Sidebar provide quick access to these index pages so teams have one place to find the work they need to get their jobs done. From any index page a user can create new Meeting Notes, File Lists, or Product Requirements in a single-click.

Creating new Blueprints from index pages is made easy using the ‘Create from template’ macro. While this macro was originally created for use on Blueprints index pages, it’s possible to use it on any Confluence page. We’ve found it incredibly useful for streamlining other business practices, such as creating project plans.

Two new parameters, editable in the Macro Browser, allow you to define dynamic page titles and can specify which space the page is created in to help everyone keep content organized in one place no matter what space they are working from.

Try it Today

Using OnDemand?

You’ve been auto-updated –  log in and make use of the new improvements now!

Using Confluence Download?

We’re currently working to make these improvements available to you via plugins that need updating in the Universal Plugin Manager in the Confluence Administration Console. Please stay tuned and we’ll let you know as soon as they are ready.

New to Confluence?

Get up and running in a matter of minutes with a free 30-day Confluence OnDemand trial.

Mike stressed that in today’s age, software development goes way beyond development teams. This was echoed by Jim O’Neill, CIO of HubSpot, who shared how his company used Confluence to scale from 10 to 500 employees while preserving a culture of innovation and togetherness.

Chris Kohlhardt of Gliffy spoke about his company’s beginnings and the growth of the Atlassian ecosystem, as well as the potential that Blueprints provides for both customers and third-party developers.

See what went down at First Look

Join us for a live demonstration of Confluence Blueprints

Want to learn how Confluence Blueprints teams can give your team a new and simpler way to create and share work? Join us for a live webinar on Tuesday May 28th at 8:30 AM (PST) where we’ll cover Confluence Blueprints top to bottom.

Register Now

In 60 short minutes we’ll show you and your team how to:

- Hold effective meetings using the Meeting Notes Blueprint
- Share files and documents in one place using the File Lists Blueprint
- Define product requirements documents using the Product Requirements Blueprint
- Make and record decisions using the new Decisions Blueprint
- Customize Blueprints for your own business processes

Registration is limited, so reserve your teams’ spots today.

Register Now

Introducing Workflows For Your Blueprints

Following the succesful release of Ad hoc Canvas Blueprints for Confluence 5.1, Comalatech have now integrated Ad hoc Workflows functionality directly into Confluence Blueprints.

Watch it now!

Check out the webinar recording of the Atlassian Enterprise Confluence Webinar here:

You can review and download the slides here.

Atlassian Enterprise

Participation in this webinar – as well as other Enterprise webinars and workshops – is an exclusive benefit for Atlassian Enterprise customers. All recordings are made available afterwards as part of the Atlassian Enterprise Resources.

Check out our website to learn more about the Atlassian Enterprise offerings for Confluence, JIRA and Stash:

Get Atlassian Enterprise

Last month, we announced Content Scheduler for Confluence as our February winner, which brings us to March…

Skiblz Cam, our March winner!

We’re pleased to announce that Skiblz Cam, a Google Chrome browser extension and plugin for JIRA, is the winner of the $10,000 add-on of the month prize for March!

Skiblz Labs created Skiblz Cam to help developers and QA teams spend less time filing bugs during testing. How? By creating a Google Chrome extension that allows users to record a short video of their open browser tab as a GIF file and create a JIRA issue with the video attached, all without having to switch back to JIRA. Using GIFs instead of another video format keeps file sizes small and means users do not need additional plugins to view files. The video files are saved directly into the JIRA database itself, so data can stay completely behind your organization’s firewall. Finally, the browser extension is all-HTML, meaning that you get the power of short videos to describe bugs without the slowness and security vulnerabilities of Java or Flash.

You can also attach GIFs to existing JIRA issues.

Runner Up: Password Policy for Confluence

Our March runner up is Password Policy for Confluence by InTENSO. Password Policy helps Confluence administrators ensure greater security for their Confluence isntances by allowing them to set security constraints when users create passwords. For example, administrators can enforce rules for minimum and maximum length, requirements for numbers, capitals, or special characters, and mandate that passwords be changed at regular intervals.

Join me in congratulating Skiblz Cam, Password Policy, and the other 19 fantastic entries we received for Codegeist during the month of March. We’ll be awarding a $10,000 prize for Skbilz Cam, and they’ll be eligible to receive the $15,000 “Best Overall Add-on Prize” in June.

Don’t forget about the Atlassian Marketplace

We’ve seen some fantastic entries for Codegeist so far, but there’s still plenty of time! Add-ons submitted by midnight PST will be eligible for the $10,000 April prize, but if that’s not enough time, we will be awarding a prize in May too. That’s plenty of time to development the next amazing add-on for JIRA, Confluence, or one of our developer tools. Stay tuned!

Start building your Codegeist add-on today.

Get Started

Customizing Blueprints’ Page Templates

Confluence comes budled with three different blueprints – Meeting Notes, File Lists, and Product Requirements. Each blueprint delivers two different page templates, a page template for the content you’re creating and a page template for the index page that collects that content in one place. See below for an example of the two different Meeting Notes Blueprint page templates:

Any System or Space Administrator can edit any blueprint template to better fit their team’s specific business processes. Clicking ‘Edit’ will launch the template editor where it’s easy to change the content of the templates for Meeting Notes, File Lists, or Product Requirement blueprints.

We massively improved template editing in Confluence 5.1 with features like instructional text which help explain what content to write and how to trigger certain editor features. Also, if you ever want to revert back to the default page template originally packaged in the blueprint, you can do so in a single click.

Adding More Confluence Blueprints

While we’ve provided three blueprints in our initial launch, there are many more on the way. Regardless, we wanted to encourage anyone with a little JavaScript know-how to build their own and leverage the new blueprints framework.

Build Your Own Blueprint

If you would like to build your own Confluence Blueprints, take a look at our developer documentation. It will provide you with more than enough information to get started building blueprints for your users.

Find More Blueprints on the Atlassian Marketplace

It’s easy to distribute custom blueprints for free or sale via the Atlassian Marketplace.  Four Marketplace vendors have already partnered with Atlassian to build blueprints that are available for download today, including:

• Strategy canvases by Comalatech for managing tasks and visualizing business processes.
• Online diagrams by Gliffy for building professional-quality flow and organizational charts.
• Polls by Simplenia for creating and sharing simple polls to make group decisions.
• Evernote Importer by StiltSoft to bring notes into Confluence for sharing.

Browse, find, and try Blueprints in Confluence

We’ve made it dead simple for any user to find new Blueprints that will help them get their work done faster by embedding the Atlassian Marketplace inside Confluence.  Any user can browse available Blueprints and request that they be installed by their System Administrator. The possibilities are endless.

What Are You Waiting For?

The sky is the limit with Confluence Blueprints. Get started using, customizing, or building your own now.

Try Confluence Blueprints

New to Confluence?

Get up and running in a matter of minutes with a free 30-day Confluence OnDemand trial.

Ready to upgrade?

Check out the full release notes and start seeing real results with Confluence Blueprints today. OnDemand Customers: You’ve have been auto-upgraded with Confluence Blueprints!

And so what?

If you’re lucky enough to never have branched from a bad commit, let me share with you how ugly it can be. You have worked on this new feature, the code has been reviewed and you are ready to push it to master for the world to see, but you see on Stash that the builds are red on your branch. You start checking the builds wondering how your change could have broken all these tests. After a while you realize these tests were broken on master when you branched, but since master is green now everything should be ok. You push your change and move on. After a while build wallboards start getting red all over the office with your face on it. You did break some tests after all… But all that pain can be avoided if you take care to branch from a good commit in the first place.

Scenarios:

On the Confluence team, we don’t have a 1:1 mapping between commits and builds. So given that, the results need to be analysed a bit.

• Commit with failed builds : obviously you don’t want to branch from there
  • This doesn’t mean that this particular commit broke the build. It could be caused by a previous commit build in the same time.
• Commit with green builds 
  • The more CI builds are exercising that commit, and the more of them that are green, the more reliable the commit is.
  • For the Confluence team, 5 builds passed means all “A1. Master Baseline” builds passed, and you can branch

Thanks to the Stash-Bamboo plugin we can start your branch on the right foot, but it’s pretty much useless if you forget to check the build status before branching. One way to fix this problem for good is to use Bamboo Gatekeeper, letting Bamboo push branch changes to master once the tests are green. Or you could put a sticky note on your monitor to remind you… but I don’t recommend it.

Get the Stash-Bamboo Plugin

The Tip of the Month, brought to you by Atlassian University, is a monthly series aimed to help you master Atlassian’s tools. Products are more fun to use when you know all the tricks.

It’s been almost a month since we released Confluence Blueprints, ready-made best practices to common business problems. The response has been overwhelmingly positive as users everywhere discover the power of Confluence for solving their everyday problems.

One of the most frustrating of these problems is sharing and collaborating on files with your team.

Four easy features to help share files with Confluence

Too often files are trapped in shared network drives or email inboxes, making it impossible for everyone to have access to the most current version. We decided to tackle this problem with the File List Blueprint – which makes it easy to share and store important files with:

• Inline previews – Don’t waste time downloading a file in order to see it. You can preview your images and powerpoint presentations right from your page thanks to the HTML5 file viewer.
• Automatic versioning – In Confluence files are automatically versioned, so any new version that is attached is automatically recognized and displayed.
• Drag-and-drop simplicity – Just drag-and-drop your files onto a Confluence page to embed them. It’s that easy.
• ​Granular permissions - Once you are done creating your file list, Confluence’s robust permission scheme keeps files as private or public as you want.

Check out the File List Blueprint in action: