How to Create Interactive Content Reports in Confluence Cloud

The Page Properties Report macro is one of the most popular macros in Confluence Cloud. A lot of users worldwide are using it to generate numerous reports on the content items they keep and manage. It lets you store additional metadata about a Confluence page and re-use it when needed for producing reports on content.

Tracking blog posts

Let’s say we create different media assets for customers of our products. All this information we post in our blog and classify it according to the content type. For each asset, we need to track a variety of additional attributes, as follows:

• Author — name of the user who has created the asset.
• Reviewer — name of the user who reviews the asset.
• Topic — topic which the content attributes to.
• Type — type of the content asset (like how-to articles, company announcements, case studies, guides, and so on).
• Status — status of the asset, whether it is in progress, in review, or published.
• Due date — date when work on the content should be completed by.
• Publication date — date when the content was published to the blog.
• URL — address of the posted asset.
• Metadata — description of the asset for the search engine.
• Keywords — keywords for SEO optimization.
• Pageviews — number of pageviews after a month since the publication. It is used to identify the most popular content items.
• Bounce rate — bounce rate for the content asset published in the blog.
• Comments — number of comments to see which asset caused more discussions.
• Likes — number of likes put on the website.
• Shares — number of content shares to see what content was more valuable.

All this content metadata is aggregated within tables with the Page Properties Report. We generate the resulting report based on different metadata values to keep only the essential information within our report.

As the result, we have two reports. One report shows the content’s status, and the other shows the popularity of this or that content item.

Editing page metadata

Once you generate a report on the content, you may notice some inconsistencies, incorrect statuses, or you may need to change the publication or due date. Going to the target page is always a problem. You lose the context, and you need to edit the page, change the value, save it. If you need to do this for multiple pages, this becomes a long-lasting routine.

What can we do to optimize and accelerate this procedure in Confluence Cloud?

Well, first of all, let’s install the Handy Macros app and create two sets:

1. Status — this set will be used to track the current progress of the posts you have.
2. Type — type of the article.
3. Topic — topic which this post relates to.

Having created the two sets, we can add them to the page template which is used to create content. Now we can select the content status and its type in the page view mode. We can also edit these values in our resulting report on the fly.

Additionally, we also have dates in our reporting table. Sometimes people forget to pick the correct date or change the priority for a specific post when needed.

Here we can add the Handy Date macro on Confluence pages and pick a new date in the page view mode or in the resulting report generated by the Page Properties Report macro. Our final table lets you pick the content type, topic, status, and change the due and publication dates in the report itself.

This way you can simplify your experience with editing information and save a bit of your time on more important activities. You no longer need to go through a time-consuming routine to make small edits on your Confluence pages with the Handy Macros app.

If you like this post, feel free to clap (you can leave up to 50 claps per post). This will give us much more power to prepare useful content for you.