some notes about Confluence

[Stefano Bagnara <ap...@bago.org>]

Hi all,

During the past days I played a bit with our new confluence space.

I customized the space so have our website menu on the left (well, the
blue is because of an issue in the template, I'm not able to make it
white ;-) ) and I tried to reproduce our news and some of our website
pages (News, Overview, Mailing List and Guidelines) via the wiki syntax
to better understand how it works.

You can see our "editable" confluence space here:
http://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/JAMES/Index

Every time a change is done in a confluence page Confluence
automatically export a static version of that page to:
http://cwiki.apache.org/JAMES/

As you can see I already configured the autoexport plugin to use our
official website layout and the result is very similar to our website.

As a test I added to the bottom of the exported pages the "Added by
<creator>, last edited by <editor> on <date>" and the links to edit the
page or view it in the confluence space. This footer can be removed, of
course.

If you are subscribed to site-dev you may also have noticed that I
enabled email notifications for page changes (this took a while to
figure out because ezmlm for site-dev was configured to reject every
message with the "Preference: bulk" header, but with the infra team help
we finally did it).

So far everything shine, but I also want to share a list of issues I
noticed while playing:

1) Notification emails are generated only if the editor does not use the
"Minor edit" flag.

2) Notification emails always send the full page and not a diff! This is
very surprising for an enterprise wiki!! At least they contain links to
online pages with nice diffs.

3) When you edit a page it is autoexported but, if pages showing
contents from this page exists, they are not automatically updated. So
if you add a news you have also to make at least a minor edit to the
homepage, if you change the Navigation page (the one generating the left
menu) you have to update each page (or to use a menu option to
regenerate the whole exported site).

4) Our current maven generated pages uses a lot of section/subsection
stuff and this is converted by maven to something like
<div class="section">
  <h2>title</h2>
  <p>my text</p>
</div>
the only way to do this in the wiki syntax is:
{div:class=section}
h2. title
my text
{div}
So it is a bit verbose for a wiki markup.

5) Confluence does not support nested identical tags!?! so if you want
to write 2 nested divs you have an hack: aliases div2-div9 for div
exists, so you end up with:
{div:class=section}
  {div2:class=subsection}
  {div2}
{div}

6) Dates for news items cannot be changed. So news pages get the date
when you create them and cannot be changed :-/ .

So far here are my findings. I'm not yet ready to create any proposal
based on this, but I wanted to share this anyway. Maybe someone else
want to add thoughts to this.

Stefano