How Stuff is Organized in Confluence
- Mark Gallimore
Contents
The Confluence Home Page
You may have arrived at this site through a link someone sent you. Or, you may have come through Confluence's Home Page by typing "wiki.canisius.edu." Either way, you can go (back) to the Confluence Home Page by clicking Canisius College Wiki in the blue bar above, lefthand side. The Confluence Home Page shows you all spaces are available to you in Confluence.
Spaces
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Spaces are areas within Confluence housing collections of pages. Each division of the college has a space and, because of their complex organization, the three Academic schools have spaces of their own. A handful of offices and departments have their own spaces, due to particular needs.
Within spaces, content is organized and presented on pages, like other websites. Day-to-day, the space organization in Confluence is not significant for users, although you may belong to an office with a space of it's own, configured differently from the five division and three school spaces.
Pages
Within spaces, Confluence content is on linkable pages. These pages may be organized in a multitude of ways. Every space has a home page. Other pages within a space are called "child pages." Any page with pages organized below it in the space page tree is the "parent page" of those below it. Accordingly, any page below a parent page in the page tree is the child page of that parent page.
Confluence creators, who manage one or more pages for an office or department, might control only one page or might have multiple pages arranged in a parent-child relationship.
Restrictions
Pages, and in some cases whole spaces, can be restricted so that only certain people can view or edit them. Some pages are visible to all Canisius employees, but no one else - not students, nor the rest of the world on the web. Others are limited to just a few faculty or staff. Probably most pages on the wiki are visible to the entire world, since they are used by divisions, offices, or departments to broadcast information that is not sensitive but is helpful to everyone at Canisius, and maybe clients, stakeholders, partners, or prospect students off-campus. If you cannot find a particular page you believe exists in the Canisius wiki, start by logging in. Then, if you cannot find it via search or navigation, contact someone whom you believe may be able to grant you access to it.
Navigation Options
In most cases visitors arrive at the wiki through a link that was shared with them via email or social media, or installed on another internet resource. But it is possible to browser or navigate the wiki to find what you need.
The Confluence Home or Landing Page
At wiki.canisius.edu, you'll find a home or landing page for the entire Canisius wiki. Here, visitors can see three major navigation methods in the wiki.
On the lefthand side are two navigation options that are currently under construction and only partially complete. One is the college organization chart. The other is the resources chart. Each has a starting grid with links on the wiki landing page:
The Divisions of the College, or College Organization navigation tree simply follows the organization of the college and in most cases, that of wiki spaces. The Divisions links go directly to spaces for each of the five divisions. Within the Division spaces, pages or links are arranged by office or departments. The schools within the Academic Affairs Divisions also have their own spaces as well.
The Resources link set provides a way for visitors to reach things most relevant to them, faster. The Resources links each go to separate pages in a single space, where there are grids with links. No other pages or content should be in that space if they properly belong to any administrative unit of the college. Exceptions would be pages that provide documentation or instructions for resources that straddle administrative units of the college (and that are probably managed by ITS administrators.)
On the righthand side is a Space list. This is an older navigation method that will be phased out as the lefthand navigation options are completed.
Breadcrumbs
Within any space, you can use the links up top, arranged between slashes, to go back up the chain of parent pages. So, for example, if I see Getting Started in Confluence / Dashboard / Canisius Wiki: the Basics / How Stuff is Organized in Confluence at the top of a page, I can click "Canisius Wiki: the Basics," to return to that page, and "Getting Started in Confluence" to return to the space's home or top-level parent page.
In-Page Menus
A lot of pages will have lists of links to other pages. Here's an example:
Center for Online Learning and Innovation
If you manage multiple pages within the wiki, you should provide navigation on your pages so that users can find your other pages. For example, on your highest-level parent page, you can provide links to navigate to your child pages. In this guide, you will discover how to have an automated gadget called a macro manage that for you. You can also learn how heading styles and a table of contents macro provide easy, automated navigation for visitors on your pages, as is done on this page you are reading now. (Skip ahead to read about Navigation options.)
If you are using a desktop or laptop computer, or some mobile devices, you may see a collapsible lefthand menu that also contains page navigation within a space. This will work if you see it but many mobile devices do not display it. So if you manage wiki content you need to provide navigation for your users within your pages. If you do not, mobile users will likely tell you they cannot find content you told them was in the wiki.
Search
The wiki has a search feature (in the upper right of any screen) that frequently returns helpful results. However, the wiki is a continuous work in progress, so page titles, especially on older pages, can often be non-descriptive and unhelpful when searching. So please be patient; search results should improve over time.
Time to start building content in Confluence? Here's the Basics >>