Wiki Use FAQs

Owned by Emilie Hardman (Unlicensed)
Last updated: Sept 11, 2014Version comment
2 min read

The Harvard wiki site is run on Confluence, an Atlassian product. The Confluence User's Guide is a helpful place to start getting familiar with features and functions available to Confluence users and space administrators. Atlassian maintains comprehensive documentation on Confluence that is usually, though not always, applicable to our instance. It is, nonetheless, always worth checking when you have a question about how to use this wiki. 

You might also find useful content on the Confluence Ninja Training site; a variety of short videos there walk users through various tasks and quick instructions are provided at "white belt" through "black belt" levels.

The following sections are certainly covered in the documentation and guides linked to above, but to offer quick reference to common problems, a few surprisingly non-intuitive tasks you may wish to accomplish in Confluence are described here.

 

Adding pages

To add a page in the site, click on the "Create" button in the upper left-hand corner menu. More recent versions of Confluence make use of an "Add page link" which is not present in the Harvard site.

Arranging pages in the site hierarchy

To move a page to a new location within the wiki, select the "Tools" button in the upper right-hand corner. Select "View in Heirarchy." If the default display is not "Tree," use the "View" menu to select "Tree." Open up collapsed sections as necessary. Left click with the mouse and drag any page or section to a new position in the tree. 

Exporting wiki contents in .pdf format

  1. Select “Browse” (from menu in upper left corner)
  2. Select “Space operations”
  3. Select “PDF export” from lefthand side menu under "EXPORT"
  4. If only selections from the wiki are required, choose “Custom export” and click parts of the manual desired, else, proceed with "Normal Export"
  5. At bottom of page, click “Export” box
  6. Wait for export to complete to 100%
  7. Click “download here”
  8. Save document to proper location in your files

Macros

Confluence offers many useful macros. To explore the options and experiment with possibilities, either type "{" and select "Open Macro Browser" or click on the "+" button and select "Other Macros."

Opting out of notifications

If you get email notifications each time a page is altered and would like to stop receiving them, use the link provided in the email to open the Confluence wiki page. Click on the "Tools" button and select "Stop Watching."

Receiving notifications

 

If there is a particular page you are interested in following, click on the "Tools" button and select "Watch."