Confluence on Micha Kops' Tech Notes

Creating a Blueprint or Content-Creator Plugin for Confluence

Sun, 17 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0100

Blueprint is a new API in Confluence 5 that allows developers to create new content elements and to hook into the Confluence “create” dialogue – not to be confused with OSGi blueprints, the CSS blueprint framework or Tinkerpop Blueprints here.

Content may be added using simple XHTML templates, dynamic templates enriched with data from context providers or even customized JavaScript dialogues.

Another feature is, that pages of a specific blueprint type may be aggregated in a collector view that displays all pages created with the specific blueprint

Confluence User Profile Mobile vCard Plugin released

Sat, 18 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0200

I’ve released a new plugin for the popular Confluence Wiki that extends the user profile with new tab that displays the user’s vcard as a QR code.

This allows an easy import of address data from Confluence to your smartphone.

Features

Display of a Confluence user’s contact data as a QR code in a separate tab in the user profile
More to be implemented ..

Installation

Just download the plugin from Atlassian’s Plugin Exchange and install it using the Universal Plugin Manager in your Confluence’s administration area
That’s all .. nothing to configure here ..

Confluence Social Comments Plugin

Mon, 30 May 2011 00:00:00 +0200

I have created a new, free plugin for Confluence, the popular enterprise wiki.

The plugin allows you to notify users of ongoing discussions in comments on a confluence page by posting a specific token including the user’s name like this: “@username:”

Features

Configurable notification settings in the administration area
Several placeholders to be used in the e-mail template for the notifications
User filtering to avoid sending duplicate e-mails
For more detailed information take a look at the Maven generated project website

How to create a Confluence SOAP Component in 5 Minutes

Sun, 24 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0200

You’re using the popular Confluence wiki? You’re using its RPC/SOAP API and missing a function you really need? Just extend the capabilities of the Confluence RPC API by programming a custom web service component – it is really easy and also well documented.

In this tutorial we’re going to take a look on how to quickly implement a SOAP service, securing it and putting its methods in a transactional context.

Prerequisites

Maven >=2
JDK >= 5
Confluence Wiki >= 3.0 (for a quick installation guide take a look at this article)
SoapUI for Testing

How to create a Template Bundle Plugin in Confluence

Mon, 12 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0200

Since Confluence 3.2. there is a new plugin module type that allows you to deploy templates in a bundle via the plugin API.

In addition it is possible to assign these templates to specific spaces and preview available templates in the Confluence administration area.

So let’s build some sample templates..

Creating a Template Bundle Plugin

Creating a template bundle is easy – just create a class implementing TemplatePackage – there are two methods: one returns a list of bundled PageTemplate Objects the other the name for the template bundle.

Extending the Confluence Search Index

Sun, 23 May 2010 00:00:00 +0200

Developing plugins for the Confluence Wiki a developer sometimes needs to save additional metadata to a page object using Bandana or the ContentPropertyManager. Wouldn’t it be nice if this metadata was available in the built-in Lucene index?

That is were the Confluence Extractor Module comes into play..

Overview

An extractor allows the developer to add new fields to the lucene search index. Creating a new extractor is quite simple – just implement the interface com.atlassian.bonnie.search.Extractor or bucket.search.lucene.extractor.BaseAttachmentContentExtractor if you want to build a new file extractor.

Snippets: Getting License Information from the Confluence API

Thu, 06 May 2010 00:00:00 +0200

Sometimes one needs to look up license details of a running Confluence system .. perhaps for creating a commercial plugin or to display recommendations dependant from the license used. For this reason there are a few possibilities for receiving some license information from the Confluence API or the velocity context.

Note: This article is outdated since the Atlassian Marketplace was launched and a shiny new licensing API was added. Until this article is updated I strongly recommend to take a closer look at the detailed information that Atlassian is providing in the Developer Documentation.

How to build a Confluence Macro Plugin

Tue, 13 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0200

The goal is to build a small macro plugin deployable via the Confluence plugin API rendering some spaces.

Please note that I am going to build the plugin using just Maven and not the Atlassian Maven Wrapper called the “Atlassian Plugin SDK” – more information about that is available at the Atlassian website.

The macro output will be rendered using a Velocity template and all messages are stored for i18n in properties files bundled with the plugin.

How to build a Confluence SOAP client in 5 minutes

Sun, 28 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0100

In this tutorial we are going to build a SOAP client for the popular Confluence Wiki in about five minutes. The client is going to receive rendered HTML Markup from a specified Confluence Page.

Prerequisites

A running Confluence Installation with SOAP API enabled – if you don’t already have one take a look at this article or if you’ve got the Atlassian Plugin SDK installed .. start a standalone instance using atlas-run-standalone ..
Maven – never go without it ;)
Five minutes of your life time ..

Confluence Developer Instance Quick Setup

Fri, 26 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0100

This short tutorial shows how to set-up a developer instance of the popular Confluence Wiki from Atlassian in a few minutes.

It’s a prerequisite for a few following tutorials regarding the Confluence API and plug-in development for this system.

We want a quick install so we are going to run Confluence with the embedded servlet container and HSQL database.

update Meanwhile it is way much easier to use Atlassian’s Plugin SDK using atlas-mvn run or atlas-mvn-run-standalone –product confluence –version x.x.x but if you need to setup an independant instance, this article still might be useful.

Atlassian Snippets

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0100

Disable YUI compressor

<plugin>
    <groupId>com.atlassian.maven.plugins</groupId>
    <artifactId>maven-jira-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>${amps.version}</version>
    <extensions>true</extensions>
    <configuration>
        <compressResources>false</compressResources>
        [..]
    </configuration>
</plugin>

Confluence – Get favourites by user

Using the label manager.

List getFavouriteSpaces(String username)

Confluence – Determine the base URL

Using the SettingsManager:

String baseUrl = settingsManager.getGlobalSettings().getBaseUrl();

Confluence – Get the context path

Using the BootstrapManager:

String contextPath = bootstrapManager.getWebAppContextPath();

Confluence – Using Velocity Template for a Macro

final VelocityContext contextMap = new VelocityContext(MacroUtils.defaultVelocityContext());

contextMap.put("key", obj); // references obj as variable named $key in the velocity template

VelocityUtils.getRenderedTemplate("path/to/template.vm", contextMap);