Page Approval Plugin

The page approval macro provides a simple and flexible way of managing and processing approval of Confluence pages. The macro keeps to the wiki philosophy of decentralisation and user empowerment. The default usage of the macro does not require any administration and hence can be managed by the wiki community. The macro also contains parameters that allow specification of approval groups, notifications, approval order and more.

For support pricing details please check the "Detailed Information" tab.

Details

The page approval macro provides a simple and flexible way of managing and processing approval of Confluence pages. The macro keeps to the wiki philosophy of decentralisation and user empowerment. The default usage of the macro does not require any administration and hence can be managed by the wiki community. The macro also contains parameters that allow specification of approval groups, notifications, approval order and more.

Structured Approval Features

Note that is is possible to user the macro to define a more structured approval process. This is done by using the 'users' and 'chain' parameters as follows:

• Users can be manually added to the list of required approvers of a page by adding their user name in the 'users' parameter of the macro.
• The 'chain=yes' parameter can be added to make the approval follow the order of the users that are specified by the 'users' parameter.
• Approvers can be specified to be the members of a group by using the 'approvalGroup=' parameter.

Dynamic Data

Dynamic data can invalidate the approval of a page because the page can change without an edit. For instance, the include macro could show different text based upon what is in the included page, independant of anything in the approval page. To get around this problem, most macros are considered 'unapprovable'. There are a number of standard macros (including 'panel', 'toc', etc.) that can be approved, and these have been hard coded into the macro.

Background

• http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DISC/Approval+Macro
• http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DEVNET/Approval+Macro

Overview

General Features

Screenshots
Report seen when not all registered approvers have approved a page.	View seen on a page when not all registered approvers have approved that page.	View seen from an unregistered approver - "Register" button allows them to register themselves

• Anybody can register as an 'approver' of any page. This is done by clicking on the 'register' hyperlink. An important concept behind the macro is that users can define the approval process by simply adding themselves as an approver.
• Pages are approved when all the registered approvers mark the page as approved.
• A page is marked as 'unapproved' until all the people in the approval list have approved it.
• Pages with registered approvers display the list of people who have registered as approvers.
• Optionally, users may also mark the page as 'acknowledged' if the 'acknowledge=yes' is specified in the macro's parameters.
• If a page is changed after it was approved, the approval (and acknowledged) status for all users is reset to blank. The status is also reset if any of the page's attachments are changed.
• Users who view a page that is not approved are able to easily navigate to the last approved version by clicking on the relevant link.
• Approvers can unregister themselves without affecting the approval status of documents they approved in the past. However, this may affect the approval state of pages that are currently unapproved (i.e. if the user removes themselves from a page where they were only person left to approve the page, then the page would be approved.
• The use of dynamic macros makes page approval impossible, because content of the dynamic data can change at any time. The page approval macro will not allow pages with unknown macros to be approved (see the note on dynamic data below for more details).
• Notifications can be setup such that users are notified (by email) of changes in the approval state of a page.
• Administrators can unregister any user.
• The 'copy' parameter can be used to copy approved pages to another space within Confluence.

Pricing

Below is the support pricing for the Page Approval plugin. This yearly cost will provide the following:

• Installation and usage support
• Bug fixes
• Enhancement request priority
• Removal of CustomWare banner on the plugin

Please note! The plugin is free to use without the above support. A license is not required to use or trial this plugin.

Additional licensed nodes for clustered installations are available on request.

Usage

This code makes approval by the users admin, msith and bob brown mandatory.

{pageapproval:users=admin, msmith, bob brown} 

This gives the approvals an expiry date.

{pageapproval:expirymonth=12|expiryday=30} - page approval expires every year on December 30th.
{pageapproval:expirymonth=11} - page expires every year on the first day of November

This code also displays the acknowledgement status of the page.

{pageapproval:showAcknowledgement} 

Bugs & Feature Requests

Bug reports and feature requests are available in JIRA.

To view the macro's documentation, click on its name below.

{pageacknowledgement-report}

Generates a report on the pages using the pageapproval macro with acknowledgments turned on. more info...

{pageapproval}

Add the page approval functionality to a page. more info...

{pageapproval-report}

Generates a report on the pages using the pageapproval macro. more info...