4 Departments, 1 uses Jira - all use Confluence, how to make an Project overview
Asked by Thomas S.:

Hello community,

we have 4 departments, 1 uses Jira for Scrum-Softwareengineering, the others dont.

All are able to use confluence. The boss wants to have a space, where he can see the status for the projects of the departments. All departments work on their own projects.

I thought about making a space where all projects come together, where every department chief adds a site for a project, which includes basic project data and a dropdown field for the progress.

Then i wanted, that a page property report reads the marked progress and puts it on the overlying site. That works but the problem is, that once a progress is selected while adding the project site, it can't be altered. Is this right?

Does anyone have an idea for another way to make the overview for the boss viewable (he has no deeper insight on Jira and Confluence)? He just wants an page where he can see what the progress in the different departments is.

I hope somebody has an idea.

best regards

Thomas


Answers:
author: Thomas S.
body: Hello Tobias, thank you for the hint.

The Easy Dropdown Menu Plugin solved the problems, it is a great Plugin.

Big recommendation from me.

Greets

Thomas


author: tokcum
body: Ok, now I understand the problem. I was misguided by the page property macro part of your question. But it's more related to the dropdown.

You implemented the dropdown in the template. When you instantiate a page from this template the dropdown is available. After page creation the drop down is gone.

I'm afraid this is "works as designed". Confluence doesn't offer dropdowns in pages. That they are available in templates is just for convenience. The choice selected in the dropdown is then transfered as text to the page.

I found this post: [How to create a dropdown list in a template?](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-questions/How-to-create-a-dropdown-list-in-a-template/qaq-p/715102)

There is also an add-on available which sounds promising: [Easy Dropdown Menu](https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1216797/easy-dropdown-menu-drop-down-selection?hosting=server&tab=overview)

I did not test it yet. Just skimmed through the docs and screenshots.

Kind regards,

Tobias


author: tokcum
body: Hi Thomas,

thank you for explaining it in more detail. I'll try to reproduce that after diner.


author: Thomas S.
body: Hello Tobias,

first off all, thank you for helping me out.

With *"a progress is selected"*i mean that i created a "new project template" in which a page property field with a List variable is set, the list is filled with all steps the project is going to fullfil until it is completed. I hoped, that after the creation of the project site, the dropdown bar is still available, so that the PO can update the progress and the boss will see the actual status on his site. But as it seems, the dropdown is not any longer "adjustable" so the once selected progress step is set forever. After releasing i can only erase the step and write something different.

Confluence Version is 7.10 but it is planned, to update in the next weeks.

thanks


author: tokcum
body: Dear Thomas,

with Pages Property macro you are on the right track. This is supposed to work. What I haven't fully understood yet is what you mean by "a progress is selected" and "can't be altered". I assumes this affects just the project status pages. On the boss overview page altering project progress is not supposed to work.

One step back: does selecting and altering project status work without the page property macro?

What is your Confluence version?

Kind regards,

Tobias


Tags: confluence-server

page-properties-report

server