Using Confluence to Auto Generate Project List & Finance List
Asked by Sebastian Shaw:

Hi,

We use confluence extensivly as a knowledge base, and each Project has its own space within Confluence with a standard stucture.

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We also maintain a central list in confluence of projects with their status against them, as well as a finance page for each project with various finance details.

What I'd like to be able to do is have a page on each confluence space for a project with the finance details and project status, and have this summarized in a single (or two) pages for the project status and finance status.

Has anyone done something like this, and if so, how was it done?

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My suspicion is that it might require the Scaffolding plugin from what I've seen, but I'd appreciate any advice thats available.


Answers:
author: Chuck Gould
body: Sebastian,

I have done something similar to this. What I did was use the CustomWare Scaffolding and Reporting plugins. The Scaffolding pluging allows you to create forms and store data on pages. The Reporting plugin allows you to report that information - essentially rolling up data across multiple wiki pages (and even wiki spaces). Reports can be rolledup into a single page or separate pages or even in a dashboard using the Charts macro.

A Live Template is used to create the project home page containing the data that is reported on. Being a Live Template this means that if you need to change or add values to the data collected on each project home page, you are able to change the Live Template and have the change propagated out to all the project home pages.

As part of the Live Template I assign a label which assists in accessing data across all wiki spaces. By assigning the label as part of the template it is automatically reapplied (if removed) each time the page is rendered.

Ideally the project home page should be a global template. If not, you will need to replicate the the template in each wiki space. Templates created at a wiki space level are only available to that wiki space. Creating a template (live or otherwise) requires space admin access to place it in the wiki space or system adminstrator privileges to place it in as a global template.

The CustomWare Scaffolding and Reporting plugins are extremely powerful, the resulting data can be rolled up or displayed in a variety of ways. The learning curve is a little steep and probably benefits from a programming background, documentation it ok and some examples have been provided as Recipes on CustomWare's site.

I learned a lot through using the CustomWare community support forum at:

<http://community.customware.net/customware>

lots of good people there who helped. It functions similar to this support forum (which is also a good source of information).

The key is laying out your data structure (and data options for the fields) as best you can on paper before you being. The Scaffolding forms allows you to control data input so you get consistent data entry.

Underneath the project home page - all other pages related to the project are created. This allows a wiki space to host multiple projects. In our case the wiki spaces are broken up by application and projects related to an application are contained within the wiki space. We currently are using this methodology to report across 20 wiki spaces for a total of a couple of hundred projects. Not all the projects are active, but provide a historical reference.

Hope this helps.

comments: author: Sebastian Shaw
body: Chuck, that sounds exactly what I needed to know. Thank you, thats been really helpful!


Tags: confluence-app

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