In Confluence, content is organised into spaces. There are two types of space:

  • Site spaces, sometimes called 'global' spaces, are areas on your site into which you can group content items (pages, attachments, news, etc) based on any subject or topic of your choice. For example, you may want separate areas on your site for each team or project within your organisation.
  • Personal spaces belong to specific users. You can keep your personal space private, or open it up so the whole world can view or edit it. Personal spaces are listed in the People Directory. They are not listed on the 'Spaces' tab on the dashboard.

What is a Space?

A space is an area within Confluence, containing your pages, blog posts and other content. You can think of each space as a sub-site, or mini-site, each with its own home page.

Each space:

There is no limit to the number of site spaces you can create in Confluence.

On this page:

Related pages:

Viewing the spaces in a Confluence site

Confluence displays a list of spaces in the following locations:

  • The dashboard displays a list of all the spaces in the Confluence site that you have permission to see. You can make a space as a favourite, or categorise the space, to get easy access to the content that is most relevant to you. See Customising your Personal Dashboard.
  • The space directory displays a list of all the site and personal spaces in the Confluence site that you have permission to see. You can choose to see all spaces, the spaces you have marked as favourite, or the spaces in a given space category. You can further restrict the number of spaces displayed, by entering a word or words in the Filter box. Confluence will display only the spaces that have the matching words in the space name or description. See Viewing All Confluence Spaces.
  • The people directory displays a list of all Confluence users, including those who have personal spaces. See Searching the People Directory.

Guidelines for dividing content into spaces and pages

To ensure maintainable and logical spaces, consider the following points when allocating your content to pages and spaces:

  • Group the content by topic, subject, project or team.
  • Evaluate permissions across the wiki content. If members require conflicting access, for example John must access content on topics A and B, while Jane must access content for topics B and C, then the topics should be separated into three spaces.

Useful notes about spaces and pages:

  • Spaces cannot be nested. You cannot have parent and child spaces, but you can have parent and child pages within a space.
  • Page permissions can prevent users from accessing a specific page, even though they have permission to access the space.
  • Page permissions alone cannot keep the existence of a page secret. The page should be in a restricted space instead.
  • Pages can be moved between spaces.
  • You can group related spaces, using space categories.

Example: Favourite spaces as shown on the dashboard

The screenshot below shows the area of the Confluence dashboard that displays the spaces that you have marked as favourite:

Notes

A space key is a short, unique identifier for a space. For example, you might give your documentation space a key of "DOC". To find the key of an existing space, look at the Confluence URL for a page in the space. The standard Confluence URL has this format:
http://my.confluence.site.com/display/SPACEKEY/Page+Name

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