David Simpson

I recently started building Confluence plugins. The first one being my Google Analytics plugin for Confluence. This post outlines my “journey” into Confluence plugin development. It documents a beginner’s pitfalls when developing with the Atlassian Plugin SDK. Hopefully others can learn from, or at least laugh at my mistakes.

Where I was starting from:

• No experience of maven
• No understanding of how Confluence plugins work or how they are written
• Some experience of Java – Mainly uPortal/Luminis portal development for the University of Nottingham and some consultancy work e.g. for Astra Zeneca, Documentum and 3Com
• No experience of unit testing or integration testing in Java – oh dear
• I prefer UI work to real programming

I’m pleased to announce the release of my first Confluence plugin — Google Analytics plugin for Confluence.

It lists Google Analytics reports for a particular Confluence space – from within that space. The current version has 10 reports and shows the first 20 results for each report.

• Top Content
• Depth of Visit
• Internal Search
• Browser and OS
• Browser Version
• Screen Resolution
• Network
• City
• All Traffic Sources
• Search Engine Keywords

Here are the slides from a talk I gave at the European Luminis User Group in Nottingham last week.

Outlined are some thoughts behind reusable UI elements in the Luminis portal at the University of Nottingham.

We run Confluence with the (default) en_GB locale and language. For our purposes, some of the boilerplate text needs changing. This post describes how to solve this problem with a partial British English language pack that overrides only part of the Confluence interface text.

…or how to display attachments in an unordered list.

Something that bugs me in Confluence is the way that attachments are shown. The default view is a big table with just about all the information related to each attachment.

This is great if you want all this detail, but I’m a simple soul with simple needs.

Krug suggested “Omit needless words”. In this case, it’s more of “Omit needless metadata”.

Less is more

Enter {list-attachments} – a user macro that dispenses with the excess. It displays an unordered list with the filename, file size and last modified date. If there’s a comment for the attachment, this is displayed in the link text rather than the filename.

This is a really straightforward view of the attachments on the page.

Here’s a quick demo I wrote to test out the Google Analytics API.

It shows pageviews for an Atlassian Confluence wiki on a space by space basis.

You’ll need your own copy of Confluence hooked up to Google Analytics for the demo to work, so I’ve done a video demo too – no sound, sorry.

Confluence & Google Analytics Javascript API from David Simpson on Vimeo.

Here’s a quick screencast I made to show how easy it is to add custom segments – e.g. based on country/territory – to Google Analytics. There’s no audio. Sorry.

Adding custom segments to Google Analytics from David Simpson on Vimeo.

Having installed Google Analytics on Confluence, you need to ensure that you’re not lost in a world of pretty metrics.

Make sure that your new analytics toy produces something solid and actionable. Anything less is just a shiny curiosity that your organisation will soon fail to engage with.

This article presents 4 useful tips that really show the power of the analytics data available. Each one can help improve the success of your Confluence installation.

If you’re using the Verdana typeface in your printed documents, stop now.

There is no need and it is helping destroy the planet.

Verdana takes up about 19% more horizontal space than Arial. So a switch away from Verdana could reduce your paper costs by up to 19%. For further savings, switch to duplex printing at the same time.

If you need a font designed for readability, try the granddaddy of readable fonts – Helvetica – or at a pinch Arial.

Want to know who are the most active users on your Confluence wiki this week?

This wiki markup snippet should help. It tabulates:

• Overall activity
• Page creations
• Page Updates
• Page views
• Page Popularity

h1. This Week's Wiki User Activity Charts
 
h2. Overall
 
{topusers:spaces=@all|timespan=1w|period=weekly|events=create,update,view|display=icon,title,count}
 
h2. Breakdown
<code>
|| Page Creation || Page Updates || Page Views || Page Popularity ||
| {topusers:spaces=@all|timespan=1w|period=weekly|events=create|display=icon,title,count} | {topusers:spaces=@all|timespan=1w|period=weekly|events=update|display=icon,title,count} | {topusers:spaces=@all|timespan=1w|period=weekly|events=view|display=icon,title,count} | {popular:spaces=@all|timespan=1w|period=weekly|events=view|display=icon,title,count} |
</code>