How to create a new "view" page with contents embedded from other pages?
Asked by Juan Vazquez:

I would like to ask if it's possible to create a new page which contains contents from another pages. The idea is which the new page acts as a "view" of other page contents.

I think an example will explain better which I would like to do. Imagine I've two pages with the next contents:

Page 1: Summary a; Section b; Section c; Results d;  
Page 2: Summary e; Section f; Section g; Results h;

I would like to create a third page like this:  
Page 3: Introduction; Summary a; Summary e;

And I would like to see "Page 3" updated automatically if I update "Page 1; Summary a" or "Page 2; Summary e".

Can it be done with confluence or any plug-in?

Thanks in advance.

Regards,

juan


Answers:
author: David at David Simpson Apps
body: I would create the summaries, sections and results as separate pages in an "inclusions library" and then build up each page using the **include** macro to add the components that are required

For a good overview on how to do this, check:

* [Organisation is Key](http://blogs.atlassian.com/2009/03/organisation_is/) by Matt Hodges
* [Content reuse on a wiki](http://ffeathers.wordpress.com/2008/07/19/content-re-use-on-a-wiki/) by Sarah Maddox

comments: author: Juan Vazquez
body: oooo thanks very much for your answer.

I wast just exploring the {include} macro because it allows to include contents between spaces. I think that contents organisation could be a key for successfull usage of this macro as you say :)

Your answer is very appreciated!

Regards,

juan


author: David Peterson
body: The other main plugins for this kind of thing are Reporting/Scaffolding and Metadata. Not sure if Metadata is 4.0 compatible, but Reporting/Scaffolding are not yet, but we're working on it. Keep an eye out for updates to all the above I guess - 4.0 is still a bit fresh yet for the 3rd party plugins to catch up, especially when it's such a massive change.

comments: author: Juan Vazquez
body: Hi David,

Thank you very much for your response. It's very appreciated :-)

I'll keep update about those plug-ins!

Thanks very much!

juan


author: Sander Brienen [Avisi]
body: Scaffolding and reporting are mostly used for displaying lists of attributes and values on a page. Not for including complete page sections on a different page.

Although scaffolding and reporting are very powerful, I would not use these in this context.


author: David Peterson
body: Reporting is quite capable of doing that, it just needs a way to identify what you want to pull out, same as excerpt/multi-excerpt/etc. Not really a huge difference there really...


author: Juan Vazquez
body: Thanks to both for your comments. Very appreciated in my case (new confluence user :) with a lot of materials for review!)


author: Sander Brienen [Avisi]
body: Ofcourse reporting can do it. But why install a plugin if you can do it with out-of-the-box functionality. We always advise to use as few third party plugins as possible. Each extra plugin you install is a candidate for blocking future upgrades. We are already discovering this, where scaffolding is blocking the upgrade to Confluence 4.


author: David Peterson
body: Sure thing, I understand that. Anyway, not trying to start a flamewar. The fact is, they don't currently work in Confluence 4.0 anyway, so it's somewhat of a moot point...


author: Juan Vazquez
body: Hi Sander and David,

As I said before your comments are highly appreciated. We're new in the confluence world so any comment or recommendation is valuable! We'll have into account that plug-ins could block upgrades in the future :-) It's very easy go crazy installing plug-ins! We'll evaluate which of them are really useful for us in a test environment before installing them definitely.

Thanks very much!

juan


author: Juan Vazquez
body: I've "discovered" the "excerpt" and the "include-excerpt" macros, which allows to do tat :) (sorry, new confluence user)

On the other hand exist a "multi-excerpt" plug-in:

<https://plugins.atlassian.com/plugin/details/169>

It isn't marked as compatible with confluence 4. Anyone knows if there is a compatible version of multi-excerpt for Confluence 4?

Regards,

juan

comments: author: Sander Brienen [Avisi]
body: An excerpt is the bit of text you would typically see before the "read more..." link. Excerpts are on the original page and can be hidden on the page itself, if you like. Include-excerpt works like the include macro but only includes the text in the excerpt-macro body. This sounds like the way to go in this case. Multi-excerpt doesn't sound useful in your situation.

You can combine the include macro with the excerpt macro's. For example, build up page1 as follows:

{excerpt}summary a{excerpt}

{include}section b{include}

{include}section c{include}

{include}results d{include}