Not wishing to defend Atlassian Confluence team specifically as they can be very slow in implementing some improvements, but the server version is NOT a "work around"!

Whilst we haven't upgraded our server instance to V6 yet, that does seem to deal with the problem completely with options for copying attachments, labels and Restrictions

Please check the "resolved issues" available in version 6

https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/confluence-6-0-release-notes-844235309.html#Confluence6.0ReleaseNotes-issuesResolvedissues

Copy page hierarchies

By popular demand, you can now copy a page and all its child pages in one easy process. This lets you duplicate existing content, kick off new projects with the perfect pro-forma page hierarchy, or take a snapshot of important pages - the possibilities are endless.

But that's not all, you can now also choose a location to copy to. No more copying a page and then manually moving it to another parent page or space. 

Whether you copy into the same space or a different space, we give you the tools you need to modify page titles on the fly and control what's included in your new pages. 

Thank you for reminder and link.

While I indeed need the server version most to have this missing feature implemented, one of our customers is using the cloud service, so your link is helpful to add a vote there as well.

Dear Atlassian: providing a workaround is not truly "resolved".

For those adding a "+1" on this feature request - please note that this page is for the Confluence SERVER version which as you can see from the top is marked as Resolved: 21/Sep/2016 7:53 AM

If you want to vote for the Confluence CLOUD version, use this link https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-2814 

+1

+1

+1

Hi mgpasman, you can find that here https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFCLOUD-2814.

Now, where can I vote for this feature to be included in Cloud as well? 

Dee, thank you for saying that, but you should be able to see that this issue was created about 12 and a half years ago, and if you read through the numerous comments you will see I'm not the first or only one to point that problem out. In light of that, your response was overly unconcerned and blithe. I have seen this problem from Atlassian many times for years. I have been a JIRA admin and tried talking to Product Management there about it years ago, to no avail. One time when I called to report unplanned downtime in the middle of the day, I even heard a party going on in the background. 

Certainly the history of this issue is a LONG saga (and I agree many issues do sit for a long time ...)

but if you read the comments here carefully, you will find it was announced on 2nd Nov 2016 that it was solved in version 6 ... and reading the comments further apparently the qualifier is only on server instances, not cloud instances.

We are still on v5.8.16 so I can't verify it (i.e. we are quite happily still relying on the <<Copy Page Tree>> plugin) -

Refer the section " To copy a page and all its child pages:" on this page in v6.3 documentation   https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/copy-a-page-139013.html

You're so far off-base. I am a customer of Atlassian's, just like you.

Steven, you need to deal with your co-worker's lack of professionalism in responding to customers. Not attempt to chastise you customers in a manner which is also unprofessional. Many people here have pointed out in multiple comments that this issue has been open for years, and Atlassian has continued to ignore it for years anyway. I have seen this same problem with other Atlassian issues for years. Step up and be a professional. Solve problems for your customers and be courteous about it. That's what your customers are paying you to do.

You're sending your comments to over 400 users by commenting here. If you need support go to https://getsupport.atlassian.com/. This feature request works for most people and if you're having an issue you should follow up the proper channel. This is not a proper venue for venting.

Dee you shouldn't be snarky with your customers about a fix that Atlassian waited a full decade to implement. And now child pages have disappeared from the parent page. I'm guessing Atlassian will try to tell me this is not a bug, it's a feature, because Atlassian has given me that line before, like when they suddenly started truncating dropdown menu lists so that users can't see everything in the list if they don't already know all of the items in the list well enough to type them in.

Hi warrenzhai1,

What are you trying to achieve with your copied pages links? Could you list the steps and expectations you have?

I just ran two tests:

1. I copied a set of pages (to another space) which all contained links to each other (i.e internal linking). The copies I created all had links to each other as I expected.
2. I linked to another page external to the hierarchy. Copied the hierarchy to another space. The copy had a link back to the original space. As expected.

We are thrilled to have delivered this much-awaited, long desired feature. Thanks for your patience.

The copy page and its children option is available.  So it "works". 

However, all the links to pages (even the ones that are copied to the new space) will point to the old space and create a pretty big mess that one has to manually update every page.

Also, I can't believe this issue took 10 years to get a release even though it has the highest number of votes. 

 Regards

Yes, You are absolutely right. We wait for it now for more than 7 (!!!!) years. It's an absolut basic in such a tool !!!

Hi @Brendan McNamara,

Any thoughts on when the feature will become available to Atlassian Cloud users?

Thanks!

Hi rdavis7,

From Confluence 6.0 you will be able to copy a page and all of its child pages to the same or a different space. Our documentation here includes detailed steps for how to do this.

Cheers!

Hi - this issue is noted as resolved, but I'm not sure how to actually do this.  Can I copy a set of pages (parent page and all sub-pages) now?  (whether copying into same Confluence Space or different one?)

abarnes@atlassian.com, was this released to Cloud? Based on https://confluence.atlassian.com/confcloud/copy-a-page-724764871.html it looks like it was not. But if you look in the copy dialog in Cloud, it states that it is copying the page and the children. So the in product text got updated, but not the actual feature.

We would also appreciate it to be available for cloud installations.

I understand the feature is now available to on-prem Confluence installs; however, when will it be added to Confluence Cloud?

Thanks!

I have seen this trend with Atlassian for years now. When I was at a company with a JIRA instance hosted by Atlassian, they were constantly making changes to the UI, often for the worse, such as truncating dropdown menu lists so that non-admin users no longer have any way to see all the items in a dropdown menu list. This often meant that we had to keep re-learning the UI, and I often found that when updates happened, new bugs were introduced which I quickly stumbled upon myself, leading me to believe that the changes had not been thoroughly tested. When, as a JIRA admin, I opened support tickets with Atleassian, the bugs I reported sometimes went for years without being addressed.

Agreed, especially with such a fundamental change to core functionality with the Synchrony system used for collaborative editing I would need considerable time on our test server before I was happy to role this out to our production server.

I completely agree with not moving to Confluence 6 at this stage. In our experience the point releases in 5 since 5.5 have been quite disastrous and going down in quality since. Worse still, communicating with Atlassian support usually results in "we've confirmed this as a bug" which never gets addressed.

Atlassian absolutely have an agenda that no longer focusses on quality.

When we ask to upgrade to v.6.0 the response that we get indicates that Atlassian is holding themselves to a very low standard when it comes to quality assurance for a major release.:

"Since Confluence 6.0 was just released few days ago, Premier Support does not recommend upgrading to that version yet. 

We want to make sure that the new release has ample time to "soak" in the wild, to minimize the chances of running into undiscovered critical bugs after upgrading. While our developers make every effort to roll out new bug-fix releases quickly to remedy critical bugs, enterprise environments often do not have the ability to quickly upgrade. 

This is why we generally will not recommend the bleeding edge versions in favor of less surprises and Confluence stability. Furthermore, Premier Support will not be recommending Confluence 6.0 until the release has undergone a thorough Premier Support review with the Server development team of at least 90 days to insure that all blocking issues are corrected before the product will be recommended to our Premier Clients. This has been agreed to with the server development team to insure that our clients are provided with a stable, enterprise-hardened release.  

Until such time though, our current recommendation stands at the Confluence 5.10.8 release for now. Of course, you can still test Confluence 6.0 in a dev environment, but it's definitely not recommended for the production environment yet."

When will this be available on Confluence Cloud?

This feature is available for preview in the Confluence Early Access Program (EAP) in the lead up to the Confluence 6.0 release.
Check out the milestone release notes for more information and to download the EAP.

When will this be available?

I'm looking forward to having this work.

@Adam Barnes, I think a checkbox saying "copy attachments" would be enough. However, not copying unused attachments would be a nice bonus.

Hi,

Usually most users don't want just copy pages or spaces. They want to make adjustments during the copy process. Here our add-on Page Creator Tree and Space Tree Creator helps. Of course, attachments can be copied too and if needed the name of the attachment can be renamed during the copy process.

Give it a try:

• Page Tree Creator
• Space Tree Creator

Regards,
Stephan Sutter

Hi,

we recently released an update of our Add-On Space Admin for Conflunce, which from our point of view covers most of the requested features in this thread.
Inclucing a nice UI (with drag&drop), coping spaces, pages, attachments (all or non), a detailed view of spaces with a list of all attachments, comments, blog, trash and also we offer a bulk-editor of space-permissions.

So if you like to copy spaces, pages, attachments and so on .. you can do this in space admin the most easy way. And Space Admin is available for Data Center.

Check it out https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.decadis.confluence.spaceadmin/server/overview

Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions!

Kind regards
Daniel John

@adam barnes, if one had a really robust image management system then option 2 would be ideal, BUT I suspect most people have a combination of a proper image library and images quickly pasted on to pages. This would make option 2 a bit risky, even though in theory it sounds good.
In the absence of a 'checkbox' option (the scenario people have described as an 'Option 3'), then Option 1 would suffice. If however adding a checkbox option would not overly delay the issue then it would be awesome.

@abarnes I second @andrewdrury in voting for Option 3 - all attachments, used or unused, shown in a checklist with a select-all option. If that is not possible, Option 1 is the next best - option to copy all attachments (used or unused) or no attachments.
For option 3, our use case is similar to many others. As the main site admin and Confluence Evangelist in my organization, I want people to be able to copy existing page hierarchies so they don't have to start from scratch.

@Adam Barnes: We also copy process manuals from one Version to the next. We always need all attachments to be copied, so basically we do not need an option to omit them. If required, we would vote for option 1.

or to put it another way ... if I was Atlassian, rather than developing new functionality themselves, buy the rights off Artemis ... once the bug is fixed

well... funny you should ask ....
the original version we installed in January worked absolutely fine albeit a little "clunky" in a couple of ways but worked fine - particularly as I could de-select individual pages from the tree to be copied.
It has helped me roll out a huge number of tree copies which I couldn't have done otherwise
I am a huge fan as a result

But we recently upgraded to v2.1.0 - its user interface is a little neater ...
"but #1" I can't deselect individual pages from the tree
"but #2" it has problems when there are more than 10 pages in the tree ... they are working on that https://artemis.atlassian.net/browse/CPT-44
I am still a huge fan basically since there is no other way to do it ... I just have to spend a few minutes making sure I can copy the tree in groups of 10 pages or less so one tree may take 2, 3 or 4 groups - I create some dummy pages "aaa", "bbb" .... then group pages into those using Browse>Pages>treeview ... but it works fine and I can easily de-group in the destination Space using Broswe>Pages>treeview

One feature improvement would that the destination parent page listing is "flat" - i.e. it doesn't show as a tree itself so you have to look carefully as to where the parent page is since it is flat by tree structure, not alphabetically

.. but still a big fan taking "5 minutes" to do a tree even with grouping to "small trees"

Hi @Rodney Hughes,

What is your experience with the 'Copy Page Tree' plugin in aspects of server load and system stability? We have a very large enterprise instance and I fear instabilities and other system issues if we provide this feature to all our users.

Well, I don't actually care any more as we got the "Copy Page Tree" plugin - it has the option of selecting copying attachments or not.
But to note I have never NOT copied the attachments and I can't imagine a use case where I wouldn't because any embedded links/images would be broken.
So it depends on Atlassian's own marketing stance.

Note copying pages from one Confluence instance to another instance is not really possible from a simple plugin as proposed here or provided by "Copy Page Tree" - we recently did this but it required our host of BOTH instances to export the XML, do some URL fiddles and the import into the other instance.

@Adam Barnes - I'd vote for Option 1, unless Option 3 is available, which is to have a checklist of all the attachments, so we can (un)check any attachments we don't want to have copied. I appreciate that that might be harder, and would rather have option 1 soon than wait longer for option 3.

Our use case is that we produce project management manuals consisting of Confluence pages with Gliffy flowcharts, text, tables and some images within them. Most of the Pages will have template documents attached (such as a template letter of appointment for an architect) so that the user can create an operational document from it ( such as an actual letter appointing an architect to a particular development). These are in a hierarchy that is usually about 4 but can be up to 6 levels deep. There are about 250 pages in total, I think.

There are three variations of the Master Manual in the same Space. The same set of Pages are replicated in many parts of the 3 variations. When one of these sets of Pages are updated, we need to be able to copy the updated set of Pages / Child Pages (with the updated attachments) from one location to another location within the same space.

But we also host Manuals that we have sold to clients and customised for them on our instance of Confluence, but in different Spaces. So we also need to be able to copy Pages / Child Pages and attachments from one Space to another Space in our instance.

Finally, we sell the Manual to clients who have their own instance of Confluence, either Cloud or Server. So we also need to be able to copy Pages / Child Pages and attachments from our instance to another instance.

And in all this, we need all the hyperlinks between the Pages that we are copying to be retained.

Hope that helps.

@Evgeny Victorov
this is a different usercase i think (creating templates with subpages and attachments; we want that too!)

option 1. sounds best as sometimes not all wanted attachments are displayed on the page itself.
maybe with some separate option to download all attachments if you don't want to copy them.

just my 2cent

Adam, our use case is the following: we create a page with some children, fill them in and then understand it's good enough to be a template. Thus, we want to copy this part of page hierarchy. As this is a template, I'd like to have all the attachments copied - I'd better remove unneeded later than would fix "Unknown attachment" pieces all around.

Your input requested:
We are currently working on implementing this feature and have a consideration to make regarding the use case(s) driving the copying of attachments. We currently have an option to copy all/none of the attachments for the page tree being copied. The concern around copying NONE of the attachments is that some images/multimedia/documents will not be copied resulting in users 'losing' this page content at the destination.
Please comment on the preferred use of this option:
1. Option to copy All attachments / No attachments (e.g. 'Unknown Attachment' on destination pages)
2. Option should ALWAYS copy content which is used (e.g. images/mp4/doc/ppt/pdf) on the page and only skip attachments which are unused by any of the pages in the tree to be copied.
3. Other
Please describe your use case and any background relating to this preference to help us understand your individual needs?

Thanks Michael,
You are quite right. I've corrected the example.

Hi Mark,

is the example correct? The marked pages do not have "v2" in their title.

Good to hear that ScriptRunner can do this, too. Looks like it is indeed no voodoo. But still, this should be core functionality of Confluence.
We do have ScriptRunner licensed, btw.

Hi, we've very recently released a new add-on ScriptRunner for Confluence that allows you to copy a page hierarchy (including attachments).
This is available as a built-in script - Copy a page tree and looks like this:

You'll see from the example that it includes the ability to copy pages to the same space and replace versions (say "v3" with "v4") which would be useful if you have product documentation.

I wrote a small script for copying page tree, so maybe it would help someone: https://github.com/grundic/confluence-page-copier

Now we have 2016. Means this ticket is open since 11 years.
Means we pay 32k$ per year not be able to copy pages successfully.
Nice

Hi Adam,
You know there are 865 people that receive an email each time you update this label right?

Normand

Thank you Rodney and Bruno!
We are a Cyrillic-culture company so looks like we'll have to wait for Atlassian to add the "Copy with children" functionality.

Hi, it's a very useful tool, I use it a lot for our documentation spaces (Cloud version) when we need to issue a new version of our products. There's a minor issue you need to take into account: it does not keep the order of the pages you defined. You will have to manually reorder pages using the "View in hierarchy" option once copied. I asked the developer for an update but I think this tool will not be updated anymore. Please note it will fail if some pages are not allowed to be read by the "Copy Page Tree" account and also if you use Cyrillic characters in attachment names (screenshots for example).
Hope this helps

correct - I selected a page within the Space and copied that and automatically applying name changes "yy" to "16" - two screen shots below from the same Space - the Copy Page Tree macro and the same Space navigation afterwards

@rgh1 clarification: did it copy a specific page with its children within the same space? (not the whole space copy, not withing other space)

Copy Page Tree did create a page and its children within the same Space for me as well as into another Space.

@rgh1 I might add a note that the described functionality could be needed for others - as AFAIK Copy Page Tree copies the whole space but not the specific pages within the same space.