Here's how I might use such a feature.

I have a technical document being authored in SGML. I want to create a wiki version that reviewers can freely mark up. I could convert the SGML to HTML and then import the HTML into confluence, but I suspect the formatting would get pretty messed up in the process. The approach that most appeals to me is to convert the SGML into Confluence XML then import the XML.

Matt,

Regarding replicating the Confluence documentation. Yes, that is something we are interested in. Not just for Confluence but for Jira as well.

Confluence is decent at document control but it lacks some big features. These are already covered here:
CONF-4387
CONF-1271
CONF-1406
CONF-4333

Since those are probably a ways off, I was hoping we could import/export a single page. We could then take care of these issues external to Conflunece.

Erik

Hi Erik,

XML import & export of an individual page was available in an early version of Confluence, but was dropped when we couldn't see any purpose for it.

To address the two suggestions you give:

1. Confluence is supposed to be good at document control. It has full history, comparisons between versions, and all the useful aspects of a version control system. If you really need to pull down the content of a page to store elsewhere, that is easy and fast to do with the remote API.

If there are specific features of CVS that you need to manage your documents in Confluence, it would be great if you could raise feature requests for it. I'd be interested to know what you might need.

2. For sharing across servers, this is also better implemented using the remote API, perhaps with an event listener plugin to synchronise content when it is updated. Exporting and importing would be a more difficult way to do this, and it also can't resolve conflicts if both sources are being updated.

It sounds like you mean locally replicating our Confluence documentation in your last comment. Is this something you want to do?

Regards,
Matt

As far as what this feature could be used for:

1. Storing document information in an external repository (such as CVS) for better document control
2. Allowing different servers to "share" pages. For instance, if this was implemented as a specific permission, I could then go to Atlassian's Confluence documentation space and export a single page for use on my server. Would be useful if one needed to modify the documentation per a specific setup (end users don't need to know about all the options Confluence has, they just need to know about the ones they are allowed to use on the server they are using)

This is not currently "fixed". AFAIK, (and as far as Atlassian's live chat help knows) there is no way to export and import a single page as XML. IMO, the export/import should handle all revision information of the page. It would also be great if it handled all comments and attachments.