Multiple blog posts in one space
Asked by Hugh Bathurst:

"Multiple blog posts in one space"

We'd like to have a way for our users to 'quickly' create a blog post for any one of a number of blogs that we'd like to create in the one (Confluence) space. (We're trying to get lots of people contributing in lots of areas and think this approach will meaningfully help once setup simply.)

Closest we can get (with our 5.7.1 Confluence on our server) is a 'longer than we'd like it to be' instruction to create a blog post in the relevant space then add a label in the blog post that the Blog Posts macro uses to display so a page we create (that has the Blog Posts macro) only displays blog posts that relate to the specific subject.

Our hope is we can find a way so our users have a simple 2 to 3 step process to add a blog entry (to help get out of the habit of emailing). We'd like to avoid the need for users to have to manually type in a label name.

We're trying to keep the number of our spaces to a minimum for easier housekeeping reasons. We're happy for our admins to get the blogs setup, create templates etc. but can't see how to setup a simple process to do this. Any thoughts welcome.

FYI "[How internal blogging with Confluence created a culture of knowledge sharing at APT](http://blogs.atlassian.com/2016/04/internal-blogging-confluence-knowledge-sharing-culture/)" and "[Use Confluence for blogging and outline your blog process](http://blogs.atlassian.com/2016/02/confluence-for-blogging/)" are interesting and help but we can't see how to actually create a 2 to 3 step type process so it's very simple \& straight forward for our users. (We'd like to create our own "How to write a bog post fro Atlassian" and "Create public blog post from template" the article mentioned but can't see how to do that with what we have available.)


Answers:
author: Rodney Hughes
body: Just select "Create" on the top menu bar, - they can then choose what Space they post it to then choose "Blog post"

comments: author: Hugh Bathurst
body: Thanks for sharing Rodney. I hadn't used that. I may be missing something, but from what I can tell that option sets which space the blog post gets kept in. Our challenge is a very simple way any user can create a blog post to belong to one of potentially many blogs in the same space. (FYI. One very basic approach we're considering is a dedicated page on subjects we'd like to gather information on which gathers comments only (from anonymous or logged on users).


author: Rodney Hughes
body: I am a tad confused by your terminology - "any user can create a blog post to belong to one of potentially many blogs in the same space"

The blog is related to a Space i.e. each Space has a blog page - on the top menu bar Browse\>Blog. Any Blog created for that Space will appear there and anyone with access to that Space can see it.

We have several Spaces with a different mix of Users in each and obviously sometimes the one User has access to multiple Spaces. They can each view and create Blog in their Space but obviously not in Spaces they don't have access to.

So we have a "General Resources" Space where the access permissions is basically "Confluence User" group i.e. all Users can access it so posting a blog there posts to everyone.


author: Rodney Hughes
body: Also in each Space we have a "topics of interest" page as a parent page. Users can create a child for any specific topic they want to discuss. The other Users in that Space then add Comments to that specific page ... basically a "private LinkedIn forum" discussion.


author: Hugh Bathurst
body: Thanks for sharing Rodney. Useful insights into how others use this type of blogging option. Not surprised terminology can be confusing, has been for me before also. We want to minimise the number of spaces we use but we believe many different subjects of interest will exist within a space. Hence, we have been interested in exploring ways to setup so many could post blogs but dedicated pages would show only blogs relevant to a certain subject. Based on experiments we can see the "Blog Posts" macro can show certain blog posts 'provided' the person making the blog post manually (we think many will be put off by this extra step) enters a label (that matches what the Blog Posts macro has so the macro knows what to display on the Confluence page). FYI. Early days, but we're currently exploring using Confluence pages (acting as news gathering points, e.g. "CEO News") and only using comments (no editing of the actual page) as a quick and simple way to setup, maintain and access better communications flow.


Tags: confluence-administration