Magic Labels

Perform bulk actions on a sub-tree or a whole space
Use automations to blacklist certain labels or to let newly created pages inherit the labels of their parent
Just highlight a word to turn it into a label

Inspiration

We use Confluence a lot internally and we are especially fond of using labels to organize our content. Unfortunately, not everyone uses labels consistently, it happens to quickly that someone forgets to include a specific label, or to misspell one. Someone would then later need to fix things, which could become quite cumbersome. We just wanted an easier way to put labels on pages – and that’s why we developed Magic Labels.

What it does

Magic Labels adds three kinds of new features to Confluence Cloud:

Bulk Actions

Magic Labels allows a user to perform bulk actions on a space and sub-tree level, i. e. adding, removing and renaming labels either within a space or on a page and its children.

Rules

Use rules to automatically add or remove labels to/from pages, for example blacklisted some terms that should not be used as labels or having newly created pages inherit the labels of their parent page.

Highlight-to-Label

Magic Labels also allows users to simply highlight text on a page and immediately turn it into a label with just one click.

How we built it

We started the app with the highlight-to-label feature which we really wanted and which seemed to be easy enough to do. And it turned out that it was quite easy to take a Forge app template and expand it into our first feature. In order to give a seamless user experience, we used Atlaskit UI components in our React UI.

Challenges we ran into

Forge still is a little rough around the edges and we used some new features (like requestConfluence from @forge/bridge) that were introduced during the codegeist. Inevitably we ran into some hickups.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Despite the issues mentioned above, we believe Magic Labels runs pretty fast and smooth. We have been using it internally for a few weeks and the feedback so far has been amazing.

What we learned

Compared to Connect, Forge still is very limited – especially when it comes to events…
…but when Forge fits a use-case it’s just wonderful.
Not having to your own run infrastructure is just fantastic.

What's next for Magic Labels

We liked the rules part of the app and we would like to add more Magic here by developing additional features. Labels are such an underused feature of Confluence so anything that makes labelling pages easy is something magical. Will be available in the Marketplace soon!