So, you’ve made your Confluence product documentation space public by enabling anonymous access. Now you’re looking for a way to hide everything on your pages that isn’t content, like all the information about when and how it was created.
Therein lies the problem. There isn’t one.
No one wants everything on their public Confluence to actually be public
Who wants their customers to see staff comments, the Create button, the page history, the date the page was last modified, or the deactivated account status of a page author? All of this is internal company information. Worse, giving customers access to page history means giving them access to in-progress drafts and out-of-date information about your app.
Unfortunately, this is where Confluence falls down. When you make a space public, all that disappears is the pencil-shaped edit button. Everything else – page information, buttons, and even space settings – remains visible. Users have commented that it’s not really made for public consumption if the public sees all this information.
But they’re right, it wasn’t. Confluence is primarily a document management platform for internal use; anonymous access is an added extra. And although customer-facing product documentation has become one of Confluence’s main use cases, Atlassian haven’t caught up.
This means, at the time of writing, Confluence doesn’t allow you to customize the look of your pages for a public audience, or control what public users can see.
However, there is a way: the Atlassian Marketplace app Spacecraft.
Automatically remove certain Confluence elements and choose whether to hide others
Spacecraft is an app that lets you share a public Confluence space with a customized theme and transform it into a slick website. It also makes your documentation pages look cleaner and more professional by hiding native Confluence elements and internal company information.
Turning your Confluence space into a Spacecraft website will automatically remove several things, such as the Confluence navigation bar, the Create button, the space settings link, and the more actions dropdown. That means there will be no public access to page history, export, attachments, resolved comments, and other page information.
Everything else you have control over. Page contributors, extensions (which include the last-updated date), comments, inline comments, reactions, and the page title are all things you can choose to display or hide when you create a Spacecraft site.
Simply go to the Page Elements area in your Spacecraft administration and toggle these elements on or off.
Scenarios for hiding Confluence information
Here are some scenarios for when you might want to leverage Spacecraft’s ability to keep certain Confluence information internal and private.
Team comments
You want your team to make comments on pages but you don’t them to be visible to customers. And you don’t want to have to keep deleting comments because you might want to refer to things discussed or decided in the future.
Page title
You’re using a tool like Aura to change the layout of your page for a more visual, sophisticated, and less Confluence-y look, and the Confluence page title is unnecessary and in the way.
Ex-employees
An employee who is no longer with your company created many of the pages in your documentation and is now showing as being “deactivated” or “unlicensed” in the author byline. Broadcasting that your documentation was written by an ex-employee looks unprofessional so you want to remove the byline altogether.
Want to make your Confluence documentation cleaner and more professional by controlling what your customers see? Book a personal demo of Spacecraft or try Spacecraft free for a month.
- 7 product documentation best practices
- Documentation from Jira to Confluence – How It Works with Autopage!
- How to Create Beautiful Pages in Seconds with Aura Templates for Confluence Cloud
- Bringing Style to Your Confluence Space
