The

{children} macro is useful for easily keeping document trees up to date for a document. I like that there is one less thing to update when adding new pages.

As you may be aware Bob McWhirter has developed a script in Perl that generates an HTML site from documents in Confluence through the API. Codehaus is using this with great success.

One of the things that he's done is specify that pages named with certain key words will be generated into special locations on the html. For instance, a file in Confluence named 'Navigation' will be used for the left nav bar. In this case, it would be great to be able to use the {children}

macro, but the current page is always 'Navigation' and has no children.

What I'm proposing is that the children macro takes an argument of the page that the children should be generated from. Once that's done, several

{children}

macros in a row with different section roots could be used to maintain a dynamic nav bar on the site.

For a good example of this when it is generated by hand, check out http://despots.codehaus.org/Confluenza.