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Never miss a step with Content Formatting progress bar macros

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Never miss a step with Content Formatting progress bar macros

When publishing process information, it can be difficult to give the end user context in which each part of the process takes place. This can cause confusion to your users, reduce their productivity, and even mean failure to understand and implement the process.

Content Formatting Macros provides the Progress Bar macros to help content creators to structure process documentation, and to provide readers with an immediate visual cue as to the context of the current page. The Progress Bar macros, as with all of the new premium AUI Macros in the Content Formatting plugin use the Atlassian User Interface components to make sure that the content you create feels like an integral part of the entire application.

Using Progress Bars

There are two individual macros that need to be used when creating Progress Bars:

1. AUI Progress Bar Container

This macro defines the section of the page which is going to be used as a Progress Bar, and also defines what Step is currently highlighted in your process.

2. AUI Progress Bar Hyperlink Step

These form the main content of the Progress Bar, and define the text used at each Step plus the URL which each Step links to.

Further information about these macros can be found in the Content Formatting Macros documentation.

A Worked Example

For our worked example, let’s use a simple development process with 4 steps: Planning, Development, Testing and Deployment.

These pieces of work will be completed by different teams, but each team needs to understand the context in which their work takes place, and the Project Manager needs to understand the whole process from end-to-end. We begin by creating the process pages as simple Confluence pages in the following structure:



Once our pages have been developed, it's time to build our progress bar. Within the Process Guide page, we will add the macros we need: a single AUI Progress Bar Container, and four AUI Progress Bar  Hyperlink Step macros; one for each page in our process. We will also wrap these in the Content Formatting Center macro in order to display these nicely on the page:

 

Our AUI Progress Bar Container is set to Step 1, and each of our AUI Progress Bar  Hyperlink Step macros has a different title to display, and it's own URL to redirect to. The process documentation for this first step should be added below the Center macro, and once saved, it will look like this:

 

The set of macros from step 1 can now be copy-pasted into the Development, Test and Deployment pages, and the Step parameter of the AUI Progress Bar Container updated accordingly on each page. This results in a navigable, visual representation of where in a process you are:



Content Formatting Macros is a Confluence plugin which includes over 20 Free macros and 6 Premium macros. Visit the Atlassian Marketplace to get your free macros and evaluate the premium ones today.

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