How to create this folder structure in a page space??
Asked by Simon Parsons:

Below is a screen shot of the Microsoft Azure online WIKI. I am pretty sure I know the answer to this already, but why am I seemingly unable to recreate this folder structure in my own organisations confluence pages?

![image.png](/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/63332i7083A6046C274171/image-size/large?v=v2&px=999 "image.png")


Answers:
author: James Dellow
body: Each page within a space needs a unique name.

comments: author: Simon Parsons
body: Urgh!!!, Unfortunately, thats the answer I was expecting. I have no idea how Confluence has been going this long.

Thanks anyway.


author: James Dellow
body: If you look through the history of enhancement requests for Confluence, you will find you aren't the first person to ask for this feature! However, it is important to realise that Confluence doesn't store your pages in a hierarchy / folder structure, so the unique name requirement is a legacy of that approach. Instead, it is architected around "spaces" that contain pages. The pages can then be organised to appear in a hierarchy.

The benefit of this is that Confluence generates friendly short URLs and you aren't limited by path size if you have a space with lots of pages. You can also use reserved or unsafe characters in page names.

Confluences allows you to move pages and rename them without breaking links. In the server edition, you can also still create links to a page that does not exist yet (when someone clicks on the link, they get to create the new page).

A unique short link to a page is available that will work even if you change the name or move it.

Finally, you can also apply labels to pages (i.e. tags or categories), which can be used to aggregate sets of pages from across Confluence so you can display them in ways that ignore where this sits in the structure.


author: Simon Parsons
body: OK, I get it. However, Page hierarchy, or more importantly a hierarchical way of navigating through the content of a wiki including an ability to group pages under a common title is a \*pretty basic\* feature which many will have grown to expect. Pretty much all of the justification you give for ignoring the community on this are technical, ignoring the key point of usability. I would also suggest that if you were to listen to the community on this one you would find that it would be incredibly easy to support their needs technically, without jeopardising anything of the functionality the product currently has.

Instead - as a result of being stead fast in your denial of the problem, you have wound up in a situation where there are no doubt countless wiki's out there with difficult to use and ugly navigation and that, unfortunately, will reflect badly on an otherwise amazing product.

Thanks for your help, I am off to dream up some ugly page titles.


author: James Dellow
body: Just to clarify, I don't work for Atlassian - I'm just a long time user. Completely agree it would be great to have absolutely no constraints on how you name and organise content in Confluence.

Unfortunately Atlassian evaluated this idea back in 2011 (after it was raised back in 2005!) and argued that the technical changes to support this weren't trivial - see <https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFSERVER-2524> (or <https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-2524> - the same response but for the cloud edition).

You could probably debate some of the reasons as just the price for improving usability, but I do agree that this change would be a massive impact on existing macros that are configured to pick a target page based on a unique name. I've actually built template macros in the past that rely on this feature.

Of course none of that helps you right now with what you are trying to setup, but hopefully this explains why ?


author: a-kopchinskiy_apollo4u
body: \> Each page within a space needs a unique name  
Why? Atlassian 5 years in a row can not implement such a basic feature?


author: Markus Nerding
body: Why is it a basic feature not to have unique names? In case you get several results in a search you will prefer to have different page names to be able to pick the right one.


author: Markus Nerding
body: We had the same problem, but when thinking it over it makes a lot of sense to have unique page names expecially when you want to link to them. So we just add something at the end e.g.

Reference architectures - Enterprise Integration

Reference architectures - Identity

comments: author: Simon Parsons
body: Its should be perfectly possible to give a page a unique name, which is different to the pages \<H1\> title, which his different to its url.

Wordpress has been achieving this for years.

The issue for me here is that Confluence takes the title of the page and uses this to dictate the pages name in the url - providing no mechanism to control this separately, and due to the lack of a "folder" concept is not able to intelligently create a slug for the page that is unique.

IMHO I should be able to create two documents, one containing a header of "Dog Info", and the other "Cat Info". I should be able to name those documents both "Information" and place them in a dog and cat folder respectively.  

\[HOME\>CATS\>INFORMATION\] mydomain.com/cats/information.html \[title="Cat Info"\]  
\[HOME\>DOGS\>INFORMATION\] mydomain.com/dogs/information.html \[title="Dog Info"\]

In the following url its pretty clear that the document you are about to look at is about "enterprise business intelligence", and that it is more than likely a reference architecture document dealing with data.

<https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/reference-architectures/data/enterprise-bi-sqldw>

in confluence this would need to be something like  

<https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/reference-architectures-data-enterprise-bi-sqldw-azure>  

which imho is rubbish.  

anyway - it is what it is. Unfortunately I am not in a position where I can use a better platform.


author: Markus Nerding
body: I am using WordPress and Joomla! besides Confluence, but for a Wiki the confluence approach is by far the best for our purpose. So "unique page name" is a minor issue and can be handled easily as told in my former post.

However there are bigger issues we are facing, but that is another story and not related to that topic. After working more than ten years with WordPress and Joomla! I love to use Confluence for my new projects.


Tags: hierarchy

structure