This would still be really useful in 2022

Hi all,

Thanks for your interest in this issue.

While this suggestion has gathered significant interest, we're unable to implement all of the excellent suggestions you make. We appreciate the benefits of such requests, but don't plan to work on this for the foreseeable future.

This suggestion will be reviewed in about 12 month's time, at which point we’ll consider whether we need to alter its status.

Best,
Confluence Product Management

I'm surprised you cannot disable the global templates from showing up in a space. It's nice that one can create global templates, but when there are lots of spaces, global templates can become less and less "global".  One can already disable blueprints, how obvious is it to disable global templates?

Agreed. In addition, some type of versioning as well as a better interface for the templates than just a list and edit? Perhaps folders/containers for them? I have near 100 templates and sometimes it is hard just to click the right edit button!

As a Space Admin, it would be useful to also be able to hide (deactivate) and/or promote global templates in a given space. We have about 12 global templates which are only relevant to about 50% of spaces and otherwise completely irrelevant.

When running Confluence for a lot of years you probably have created a lot of templates. Some of them might be live templates using the Scaffolding Plugin. A huge amount of historical pages are based on them. If you decide to remove such a template, those historical pages are not displayed anymore. They have "lost" their contents due to the Template is not accessible exception.

If you do not remove those old templates, people tend to create new pages from them instead of using shiny new blueprints or different templates.

This blocks both process and creativity and leads to frustrated people in a corporate environment.

Please, make it possible to hide certain templates from the list of available templates.

My use-case is quite simple. I want to clean up among all the global templates but I don't want to delete them because I'm not quite sure which ones I want to keep yet.

Blueprints can be disabled, but why not templates?

We use SQL code in some Global Templates (live templates) that are used by other pages to display data. These are not useful to end users to create on their own and it would be nice to hide them.

Out company is large and very heterogeneous. On the one hand the users ask for structures like templates on the other hand the demands are very specialized. When creating global templates I more or less give recommendations how to structure a page. But each department likes to have some addons to the global structures which are quite individual. Their way is to duplicate that global template and to create one with their own specifics. Keeping the global templates helps new born spaces to adhere given structures for cross-space benefit but as soon as they discover self-created templates they like to "replace" the global one by deactivating it. As soon as they mature in using wiki they have to handle multiple templates where half of them won't be used in their space but still shown. From their perspective this is not focused to the essential as the rest of the wiki seems to realize though.

I have the same use case, Live Templates should not be viewable to the end user.

A combination of the Scaffolding plugin and live template has a strong requirement of hiding a base template from the user so they cannot select it.

Does anyone know if Blueprints might address this at all? It seems quite a simple request, but then again, nothing is easy.

We have the same use case as Anthony and Anita above.

Scaffolding bridges the Gap of Multi-page Templates etc that Confluence doesn't offer but as a result we have all these child templates that we want scaffolding to be able to access and use but the actual user doesn't need to see them or select them.

We have the same use case as Anthony, in that we are making use of scaffolding templates, and only want the users to use (see) the live template. It seems to me that this would be the usual case when a site makes use of global live-templates.

I have a very clear use case for this. We have a growing number of templates that use scaffolding macros, which I typically only want to be referenced using the live-template macro. I don't really want for people to be able to directly add pages from the templates, and the list of templates of interest to end users is getting cluttered with tons of options that have comments like "DON'T USE THIS DIRECTLY".

A simple tick box to hide a template would help us quite a bit. I also agree with the previous comment about versioning templates, we might only want to show version 2 of a template but would want to keep version 1 around for any pages that reference it using the live-template macro.

Hi Larry,
You're definitely right about the UI being too technical. It's an idea we are currently very much focussing on as an area of improvement for Confluence.

You might like to check out CONF-2520 .

Cheers,
Nick

I'm a newbie and there may be better ways of addressing my requirement, but... here is my "use case" in support of hiding templates....

I am using Confluence to host a site for a totally non-technical community. I like the user-friendly features of the system, but, I consider the "page operations" section too technical for my general users. I don't even want them to see all that stuff. It makes the web site seem "techie", which is the last thing I want. Of course, some of my users are techie, and I want to take advantage of their expertise and enthusiams and make some of them administrators, in which case I would want the "page operations" to be visible.

So my request is for ability to show/hide page operations based on group membership.

Mostly for versioning purposes. We use Confluence to store ISO 9001
documents. As it is, there are two different versions of the ISO 9001 format

• 9001:1994 and 9001:2000. I have set up these templates in several of our
  spaces allocated for these ISO docs, customized for each particular space.
  So two templates multiplied by many (>= 8) spaces.

The issue here is that we don't want to allow ISO 9001:2000 documents to be
initially created off the templates - in effect 'show' the 9001:1994
template and 'hide' the 9001:2000 template. Later, as we transition towards
9001:2000, we'd conceivably allow both, then eventually 'hide' 9001:1994
templates.

The short version is that it helps me to manage these templates on my own
time, and not have to recreate them in each space when we start the
transition process. Hope that helps.

Hi, Ruben.

Just so I can understand this request better. what is the use-case for having templates that can't be seen?