Administrator guide

This page provides important information for a Confluence administrator about Page Approval.

General Features

Approvals

Users can approve or unapprove pages, which sets a flag at the top of the page to appropriately indicate whether the page has been approved or not, and by whom.

• Anybody can register as an 'approver' of any page. This is done by clicking on the Register. 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 on the approval list have approved it.
• Pages with registered approvers display the list of people who have registered as approvers.
• Users who view a page that is not approved can 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 the only person left to approve the page, then the page would be approved.
• The use of dynamic macros makes page approval impossible because the content of the dynamic data can change at any time. The page approval macro will not allow pages with unknown macros to be approved.
• If a page is changed after it was approved, the approval (and acknowledged) status is reset to blank for all users. In general, if there is a new version of the page, the approval status will reset. To further highlight this, the following scenarios will lead to the approval status being reset:
  • The page's attachments are changed.
  • The approved page is moved to another space or reordered in the same space. 
  • The macro structure of the page is edited. 
  • A new macro is added to the page. 
  • The macro configuration is edited. 
  • An additional approver/approval is added to the page. 

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements are a good way to ensure that particular users have indicated they have checked the page, even if they are not approvers. For example, users in a project team can be added as acknowledgers so that the team leader knows a page has been read, however, only the team leader has the authority to be the approver of the page.

• Users may also mark the page as 'acknowledged' if the 'showAcknowledgement' parameter is specified in the macro's parameters or in the space or global level settings.
• Users can register themselves as acknowledgers in the same manner as approvers, by clicking on the "Register" button under the Acknowledgers table.
• The Acknowledgers table can be hidden if it is taking up too much room, by clicking on the "Hide Acknowledgers" link. When the acknowledgers are hidden, this link becomes "Show Acknowledgers" to show this table again. This setting is not remembered, but can be set in the parameters - please see the "acknowledgersVisible" parameter on the Page Approval page.

Other Features

• Notifications can be set up 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.

More Page Approval Settings

Please also consult the following pages:

Usage and Examples

General 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} 

Setting up Notifications

The following code sets up notifications for all registered users to be notified of all changes:

{pageapproval:notifiedusers=all|notifyapprovals=true|notifyacknowledgements=true|notifiedactions=change}

The following code sets up notifications to all registered users to be notified if a page has been approved or unapproved, but not on acknowledgement actions:

{pageapproval:notifiedusers=all|notifyapprovals=true|notifyacknowledgements=false|notifiedactions=change}

The following code sets up notifications to only those users who have approved a page if the page is unapproved:

{pageapproval:notifiedusers=approved|notifyapprovals=true|notifiedactions=unapproval}