Content Refactoring Plugin

Thanks for your kind comments and thoughts. I believe this macro is a first of its kind for Confluence, so I was in a quandry what category to put it in.

Refactoring is often discussed in wikiland, but I don't know anyone else who has implemented this kind of solution. I believe I am the first inventor of this kind of functionality in a wiki, which I call a "Post Edit" function. I first implemented it in my http://www.chat11.com several years ago, and later in my http://www.hivewiki.com system. I am so used to it, I am almost unable to write a page without having at least one factor block. This functionality really makes a wiki quick! Often I write pages that have several of these blocks in the page before I save it. It's almost like having a multiple wiki editor window. My record is to have 1200 of these blocks in one page, (the page was written by a script for input to the wiki), but that's another story and the subject for another plugin.

You are indeed correct that a different syntax could be used for this functionality, perhaps even the original syntax used at Chat11 which was to wrap the content in FACTOR child title: / content / ENDFACTOR (without the slashes of course, and FACTOR and ENDFACTOR being on their own separate lines).

My Confluence implementation is curious in that saving the page results in two versions being saved to your history, the original with the factor definitions intact, and a second version with the factors parsed out. This is a little different than how my other wikis work, which throw away the original version of text. Sometimes I've realized that I'd like to see the original text again at a later point, or would like to archive these original factor pages for future use.

So in Confluence you can go back and review your original page including the factor definitions. Although it isn't strictly necessary, when viewing the interrim version the beginning and end of each factor definition is replaced with "factor is here", so its "pre-parsing" is very limited. If you restore that version, then the act of restoring will act on the factor definitions. If you go to the Info view for a page, and click on just viewing the previous version, and then click Edit for that page version (before restoring it), you have your factor definitions back.

Or at least that is the way I wish Confluence worked. Unfortunately, even though the edit tab shows the page ID of whatever older version you are looking at, when you click the edit tab, you'll get the latest version of the page in the editor. Confluence demands that you first restore the old version, then when it is the latest version, you can edit it. Unfortunately the restore will act on the macros. I will fix this in the next version.

If the childpage already exists, then the new information will be appended to it.

A more advanced version will be available soon that makes replace vs. append an option.