Edit a Confluence page in template mode only?
Asked by Stephen Hayden:

This doesn't seem like an unreasonable question, but maybe the terms it involves being so common are what are preventing me from finding the answer.

I am teaching myself Confluence, and find that I have made a spiffy template for people to fill out, they will do so, but then are dumped into the markup/wysiwyg which could be confusing. Is there a way to restrict users to only allow them to edit the templated interface of a page, rather than the markup?

To be clear, this is the interface that appears after selecting the template to create the page from 'Step 2: Fill In Template Variables'

Thanks!


Answers:
author: Andrew Frayling
body: Hi Stephen,

You cannot restrict users to a template interface out of the box, but the Scaffolding plugin - <http://www.customware.net/store/plugins/confluence/scaffolding_plugin.html> - provides additional functionality for templates which I think does what you're looking for?

Hope that helps?

Andrew.

comments: author: Stephen Hayden
body: Yeah it does, the 'edit information' or something similar button. I suppose as part of adopting this solution if we go forward that would just be part of training, and the ability to edit everything is just a point of flexibility... yeah... thats it ;-).

I'll have to nag some of the plugin guys at the summit that they should find some way to suppress the edit as an option somewhere! Perhaps there's something in the future that could be done with permissions, sepreating the edit template view and edit page.

Thanks for the response.

- Stevo


author: Andrew Frayling
body: I'm not sure if the "edit everything" nature of templates was a deliberate design decision or a technical constraint on Atlassian's part, but I honestly like the simplicity of how they work. Lost count the number of times I've wanted to throttle MS Word template authors and their locked down templates that make content entry a battle.

Maybe that's your angle. "Hate MS Word templates? These template don't work like that at all" ;-)


author: Fred Kaffenberger
body: This is an old question, but I am in a similar position as the original poster and found a solution.

What I have been attempting is to create an FAQ template based on the troubleshooting article, but with page properties set to 'faq' and label set to 'faq'. The goal is for the user to click create new article: FAQ article and have the page automatically show up in page properties reports and other organizational structures without the creator needed to know how page properties work.

When I copied the template of the Troubleshoting article, the user is presented with the unfriendly template page described by the original poster. Instead, what I needed to do was to go to the create page for the troubleshooting article and copy all. Then, I can create a new template and paste the contents into the template. At that point I can edit the macro for page properties, related page macro, and set the labels. The result is that when a user creates a new page using the FAQ template, it looks and feels just like creating a troubleshooting page, but with different default information.