Advanced Child Display macro for Confluence Cloud

ACDC Rock-n-roll in Confluence
Headings in the page tree
headings and subpages

Inspiration

Large Confluence spaces make it difficult to find the approriate pages that contain certain part of a documentation. Confluence Searches are too verbose and you need to fine tune your search criteria to find what you're after. Confluence's built-in features like page trees and children display allow you to traverse the page trees but do not reveal further details of the page content.

What it does

Advanced Children Display for Confluence is an enhanced content browser app, which does not only show the page trees in an expandable and collapseable structure, but also lists the headings of the pages.

Page headings are an indented list of links, clicking them will navigate to the corresponding position within the page.

The on-premise version of the app has been used by hundreds of customers for years.

How we built it

We used Atlassian Forge to build the cloud version of this app.

Challenges we ran into

We have run accross the limitations of the Forge UI and had to use the Custom UI support of Forge because the built-in components were unable to render the UI elements we needed. App development by complete teams is not really supported by Forge as of now.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We could overcome limitations of Forge and implement a solution that is resilient to the size of Confluence spaces and performs well on complex content.

What we learned

This is our first Forge app and have gained lots of (sometimes bad) experiences. We know Forge is the future, but a lot of enhancements are needed before it can really take off.