Create Technical help documentation
Asked by jokermartini:

As mentioned on the confluence page it's possible to use Confluence to create a Technical help documentation. I understand and know how to create a single page in Confluence. However I do not understand how I can create something like these companies have done: <https://www.atlassian.com/blog/add-ons/5-real-life-examples-beautiful-technical-documentation>

Could someone help me out please?

Thanks


Answers:
author: Shannon Meehan _K15t_
body: Hi [@jokermartini](/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/648260) ,

Very late to this post, but I work for K15t and we were the guest authors of the Atlassian post you shared originally. All of those companies achieved their help centers or online documentation sites with [Scroll Viewport](https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1211636/scroll-viewport-for-confluence?hosting=server&tab=overview).

We recently released a new theme that makes it easy to customize to your liking without writing any code. We use this theme ourselves for our K15t help center, so you can have a look at a live example (<https://help.k15t.com/>) to see what's possible with the setup. Everything you see there is what's customizable in the theme, so logos, colors, layouts, navigation, etc. This app is available for Server and Data Center.

[Scroll Documents](https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1217608/scroll-documents-for-confluence?hosting=cloud&tab=overview) is another option if you need to make your docs publicly available. It's more lightweight on the customization end, but offers a lot of benefits for the authoring side of things like versioning, a great diffing feature, and an integration with our Exporter apps. Here's a [blog post that outlines this solution](https://www.k15t.com/blog/2019/09/create-a-public-documentation-library-in-confluence-cloud) and it's available for Cloud and Server.

If you have any questions, we'd happy to help or show you a demo. Just get in touch with us: hello@k15t.com.

Cheers,

Shannon (K15t)


author: Susan Ostreicher
body: Hi John,

Can you be more specific about what you see in these examples that you're not sure how to replicate?

Thanks!

comments: author: jokermartini
body: I would like to create a Treeview for public users to have the ability to navigate and browse through help documentation.

In short this is the current documentation for a tool I publicly share that people use. <http://boomerlabs.com/vexus_dir/documentation/>

I would like to move this documentation into something more clean and professional looking which would be confluence. But I'm not clear on how I would do that and make it so users have public access to browse the documentation.


author: Susan Ostreicher
body: Hi John,

Thanks, that helps.

Regarding the tree view, Confluence automatically puts the pages you create into a hierarchy. You can read about how to edit the hierarchy by moving and re-ordering pages here:

<https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/move-and-reorder-pages-146407727.html>

That said, if you're using the Cloud version, the page tree became pretty difficult for end-users to find when the UI was changed a couple months ago. Some users have requested the option to always show the page tree, and you can follow that request here:

<https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-56841>

Regarding public access, you can read more about setting it up here:

<https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/setting-up-public-access-156.html>

Hope some of this is helpful!


author: jokermartini
body: I'm not quite sure the page links you gave me help achieve what I'm after. Here is a live example of what I want to do. Create an online doc help where users can freely browse and view the help.

<https://support.allegorithmic.com/documentation/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=129368169>

I noticed when I made my test project publicly accessible it doesn't display like the one in the link provided. With a treeview on the left and Read only access.


author: Susan Ostreicher
body: Hi John,

Are you using Cloud? Unfortunately, the page tree became pretty difficult for Cloud users to find when the UI was updated a couple months ago. You have to have the sidebar expanded (hover and drag right), and the page tree is not shown on the overview page anymore. Many users are frustrated about this, and the best place to follow and join the conversation is through this request:

[https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-56841](https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-56841?_ga=2.255522956.521749316.1511189055-1038423284.1509037912)

Regarding public access, if you're seeing that anonymous users are able to edit pages, then you could start by going to Space Tools \> Permissions to make sure that anonymous users only have permission to view.

Hope this is helpful,

Susan