4 posts tagged with "Documentation"

Mermaid gives Confluence teams access to 26 diagram types, all rendered from plain text inside a single macro. That breadth of choice is a strength, but it also raises a practical question: which diagram types should your team actually use, and when? Picking the wrong type makes documentation harder to read, not easier. This FAQ walks through every Mermaid diagram type, explains which ones matter most for software documentation, and helps you make the right call for each scenario.

If you have ever written a long Confluence page — a technical specification, an SOP, a project charter, or an onboarding guide — you know the problem. You add headings, rearrange sections, insert a new subsection, and suddenly every manual number is wrong. "Section 3.2" becomes "Section 4.2" because you added a new section above it, and you spend the next twenty minutes renumbering everything by hand.

Numbered headings solve this. When your heading numbers are generated automatically, you can add, remove, and reorder sections freely without ever touching a number again. The numbering updates itself.

This tutorial walks through how to set up automatic numbered headings in Confluence using Modern Numbered Headings for Confluence, an NGPILOT app that installs in seconds and works immediately — no configuration wizards, no macro nesting, no custom CSS.

Confluence has been the go-to knowledge base and documentation platform for thousands of organizations. At its core, Confluence uses a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor that lets users format content visually -- clicking toolbar buttons for headings, bold text, tables, and macros without writing a single line of markup.

But an increasing number of teams are asking a different question: can we write Confluence content in Markdown instead?

Markdown is a lightweight plain-text formatting syntax originally created by John Gruber in 2004. It has become the default writing format for developers, technical writers, and content teams who work with Git repositories, static site generators, and API documentation. Its appeal is simple: you focus on structure and meaning rather than visual styling, and the formatted output is generated automatically.

Teams choose Markdown over WYSIWYG for several compelling reasons. Developer-heavy teams often already write in Markdown daily -- in README files, pull request descriptions, and documentation repos. Switching to a WYSIWYG editor for Confluence pages feels like a step backward. Markdown content is also plain text, which means it works seamlessly with version control systems like Git, diff tools, and automated pipelines. Finally, Markdown files are portable; the same .md file can be published to GitHub, a static site, or a Confluence page without reformatting.

On the other hand, WYSIWYG editing remains the better choice for non-technical users who prefer visual feedback, drag-and-drop file attachments, and toolbar-driven formatting. Many business teams have no interest in learning syntax rules, no matter how lightweight.

This FAQ addresses the most common questions teams have when evaluating Markdown versus WYSIWYG editing in Confluence, and explains how Enhanced Markdown for Confluence by NGPILOT bridges the gap between both worlds.

Long Confluence pages need structure. When your documentation runs past ten headings, readers lose track of where they are. Numbered headings — like "1. Introduction", "1.1 Background", "2. Methods" — give every section a clear position in the hierarchy. Technical docs, legal documents, SOPs, and compliance reports all rely on them.

Confluence doesn't number headings out of the box. A handful of marketplace apps fill this gap, but the market is small — Appfire's Numbered Headings dominates with 5,484 installs. We built Modern Numbered Headings for Confluence to bring a fresh approach with live preview, one-click TOC insertion, and five numbering styles. In this post we compare it against the alternatives.