AutoExport for Confluence

Name AutoExport Plugin
Description Content management solution
Product Versions Confluence 2.1.x
Author(s) Pier Fumagalli
Homepage http://could.it/autoexport/
Price Nada! Zero! Free!
License BSD
JavaDocs http://could.it/apis/autoexport/
IssueTracking http://could.it/bugs/
For the latest version of Pier's AutoExport Plugin always look at the homepage above.

A bit of background...

Atlassian Confluence is probably the best wiki system currently available on the web. The only problem with it is that (as any other dynamic application) it has a load breaking point.

For example, at Apache, the infrastructure team has always been reluctant to install Confluence because of fears that in case of extremely high peaks of traffic, it could have swamped the entire server and stop serving traffic (note that this is true with whatever dynamic application, including the other components already hosted by the Apache Software Foundation such as Jira, MoinMoin and so on).

The AutoExport Plugin is my take on how to solve this (and other) problems related to extremely highly loaded websites powered by a Confluence backend.

Description

From the need of making sure that Confluence can handle traffic on high loaded websites, the AutoExport Plugin evoved to provide a full content management solution based on Confluence offering:

  • Extreme ease-of-use: I don't want to install scripts, modify crons, run Perl. I simply want to upload my plugin and be able to configure it as I would with Confluence: through an easy-to-use web interface.
  • Fine-grained export control and content protection: By directly integrating export operations with the Confluence user management, AutoExport will detect what can (or can not) be exported, and rewrite all links automatically.
  • Different look-and-feel for editing and browsing: Don't get me wrong, Confluence is fantastic when it comes to its UI, but it's tailored for edititing content, not for browsing. When browsing content one might want a lighter and simpler user interface (or you might just want to stick ads in there!)
  • Nice URLs: Working for a publication company, I noticed that nice URLs work better both with search engines and users (easier to remember, easier to parse, easier to search). AutoExport will mangle your page titles to look nicer on your URL bar.

In other words, if Confluence is your preferred way of editing content on-line, the AutoExport Plugin is going to be your best solution for publishing it to third parties.

Screenshots (obsolete)

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Labels

contentconverter contentconverter Delete
plugin plugin Delete
codegeist codegeist Delete
fileimporter fileimporter Delete
auto auto Delete
export export Delete
static static Delete
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Comments (9)

 

  1. Sep 18, 2006

    didier says:

    Working with Confluence 2.2 ?

    Working with Confluence 2.2 ?

  2. Sep 10, 2007

    Ralf Quebbemann says:

    The plugin's source code does compile against Confluence 2.5.4 and it does work ...

    The plugin's source code does compile against Confluence 2.5.4 and it does work in Confluence 2.5.4. So I recommend to check out the sources from the website mentioned above and build the plugin by yourself.

    Pier did a fantastic job.

  3. Jan 02, 2008

    Peter Verhas says:

    Installation on Confluence 2.3.3has failed. Any new version supporting newer ver...

    Installation on Confluence 2.3.3has failed. Any new version supporting newer versions of Confluence?

  4. Mar 04, 2008

    Greg Miller says:

    Does Atlassian have plans to support this as a standard feature? This seems to b...

    Does Atlassian have plans to support this as a standard feature? This seems to be basic functionality that should be part of the standard product.

    -Greg

  5. Jun 20, 2008

    Jon Kvebaek says:

    We recently upgraded to 2.7.1, and I can't get the plugin to work anymore. Looki...

    We recently upgraded to 2.7.1, and I can't get the plugin to work anymore. Looking at this link http://code.google.com/p/couldit-autoexport/issues/detail?id=3 I see we have a problem. Has anyone been able to get this plugin workin (preferrably WITH custom template support) on 2.7.X?

    And I agree wih Greg - this should be a standard feature. We use it to export parts of our site to a public http server for project information/documentation.

  6. Aug 18, 2008

    Daniel Petzen says:

    I've tried to get this plugin to work with 2.8.1 and it seems terrible broken to...

    I've tried to get this plugin to work with 2.8.1 and it seems terrible broken to me. The latest stable version wasn't even possible to load, but I managed to load 0.15-dev.

    It all seemed to play along, but the exported result is a bit underwhelming. The main problems I've discovered so far are:

    1. All file names are converted to lower case, but the paths aren't
    2. All dynamic links are absolute (i.e. to the server they were extracted from), including the navigation bread crumbs.
    3. The link paths is a direct copy of the dynamic content structure

    I managed to get around the incorrect paths by using Alias directive in Apache, but the converted paths will require scripted processing to be resolved. I've got to be doing something wrong because this just doesn't seem right.

    I downloaded the source to remove the path conversion, but even the unmodified compiled plugin didn't work properly.

    The last bug report is from January and the links to the plugin homepage are all broken (I found it here, though), so I thought I'll post here first.

    Any ideas, hints or suggestion from anyone who managed to get this to work would be much appreciated.

    – Dan

    1. Aug 20, 2008

      Daniel Petzen says:

      I'm stubborn and I need to get this to work so I decided to use mod_rewrite in A...

      I'm stubborn and I need to get this to work so I decided to use mod_rewrite in Apache to get around the shortcomings of the plugin (and not having to use a batch script to convert the names of the files on disk). The plugin:

      1. Converts all pages to lower case
      2. Replaces '+' with '-' (and a few other conversions)
      3. Don't convert space keys
      4. Arbitrarily prepends links with '/display/'
      5. Don't convert case on any attachment files
      6. Flattens the structure to 1 dimension with attachments in sub folders

      An alias is needed for /display/, i.e.:

      Alias /display/ /location/of/htdocs

      You then need the horrific mod_rewrite (I can only safely say that the sendmail config is worse than mod_rewrite) to fix the somewhat random conversions:

              RewriteEngine On
        # Translate /display/ABC/PAGE.HTML -> /display/ABC/page.html
        # Skip all /display/*/*.data/*
        rewritemap lowercase int:tolower
        RewriteCond $2 [A-Z]
        RewriteCond $2 ![^/]+\.data
        ReWriteRule ^/display/([^/]+)/(.*)$ /display/$1/${lowercase:$2} [R=301,L]

        # Replace '+' with '-' and remove all '(', ')' and ','
        RewriteRule ^([^\+]*)\+(.*)$ $1-$2 [R=301,L]
        RewriteRule ^([^\(),]*)[(),](.*)$ $1$2 [R=301,L]

  7. Feb 26

    Morten Breum Mikkelsen says:

    The site seems to be down. Is the plugin outdated and not working with 2.10? I...

    The site seems to be down.

    Is the plugin outdated and not working with 2.10?

    If not, is there an alternative place where it can be retrieved?

    /Morten

    1. Feb 26

      Morten Breum Mikkelsen says:

      Found the link: http://code.google.com/p/couldit-autoexport/

      Found the link: http://code.google.com/p/couldit-autoexport/