60 posts tagged with "how-to"

The scenario every technical team hits: your engineering docs live in Markdown — READMEs, API references, design docs — and they contain diagrams (Mermaid), equations (LaTeX), and code samples. You paste that Markdown into Confluence, and it falls apart. The Mermaid code blocks render as plain text. The LaTeX equations show as raw $...$ syntax. The code blocks lose their syntax highlighting. Confluence's native editor is WYSIWYG, not Markdown, and the import tools treat Markdown as a one-time conversion rather than something you edit live.

Enhanced Markdown for Confluence solves this with a Markdown editor that renders everything inline — Mermaid diagrams, KaTeX and LaTeX math, syntax-highlighted code, and GitHub-flavored tables — with a live split preview. It runs on the Quikdown engine, so all rendering libraries are bundled locally (no external CDN dependencies, which matters for "Runs on Atlassian" compliance). This guide walks through writing Markdown in Confluence with diagrams, math, and code all rendering live.

FAQ pages are one of the most visited sections of any documentation site. In Confluence, they serve a specific purpose: giving your team or customers quick answers to the questions they ask most often, without making them read through pages of documentation. A well-structured FAQ page reduces repetitive questions in Slack channels, shortens onboarding time for new team members, and deflects support tickets before they are created.

But Confluence does not have a built-in FAQ feature. Teams typically resort to manual workarounds — tables, toggle macros, or expand sections — that look cluttered and are hard to maintain. This guide shows you three methods to create professional FAQ pages in Confluence, from a quick manual setup to a fully featured FAQ macro.

Announcement banners are the most visible communication channel in Atlassian products. They sit at the top of every page, impossible to miss. When you need to notify your entire organization about a maintenance window, a security alert, a policy change, or an upcoming event, banners guarantee visibility in a way that emails and Slack messages cannot.

Both Confluence and Jira support announcement banners, but their native implementations are limited. This guide covers how to set up banners in both platforms using built-in features and marketplace apps, with practical tips for getting the most out of them.

Custom fonts in Confluence let you apply brand typography to your documentation. This guide covers Google Fonts for Confluence — 1,942+ font families, live preview, dark mode support, and customization options.

Google Fonts for Confluence gives you access to over 1,942 Google Fonts directly inside your Confluence pages. You can customize font family, weight, size, color, and alignment with a live preview that shows exactly how your text will look before you save. This step-by-step tutorial walks through everything: installing the app, configuring fonts, applying them across spaces, and maintaining a consistent typographic system that respects accessibility and brand standards.

Adding illustrations to Confluence pages transforms flat walls of text into engaging, professional content. Whether you are writing onboarding documentation, putting together a team wiki, or preparing a presentation, the right visual can communicate an idea faster than a paragraph of explanation. The challenge has always been finding high-quality illustrations that look good at any size, load quickly, and match your team's visual style.

SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) illustrations solve all of these problems. They scale perfectly to any resolution, they are lightweight, and they integrate cleanly into Confluence pages. Content Craft for Confluence brings a curated library of SVG illustrations directly into the Confluence editor, so you can browse, search, and insert professional illustrations without leaving your workflow.

This tutorial shows you exactly how to add SVG illustrations to Confluence pages using Content Craft for Confluence. By the end, you will be able to transform any Confluence page from text-heavy to visually engaging in under a minute.

FAQ sections are one of the most practical elements you can add to a Confluence page. Whether you are documenting product details, building an IT help desk resource, or writing an onboarding guide, a well-structured FAQ section lets readers find answers without scrolling through walls of text or pinging someone on Slack.

The problem is that Confluence does not give you a built-in way to create FAQ sections. Teams typically resort to manual workarounds: bullet lists, tables, or toggles built from expand macros. These methods work, sort of, but they are tedious to maintain, hard to reorder, and look inconsistent from page to page.

Modern FAQ for Confluence solves this by giving you a dedicated macro for building FAQ sections with drag-and-drop reordering, WYSIWYG editing, and two display themes. This guide walks through the entire process, provides ready-to-use templates, and shares best practices so your FAQ pages actually help people find what they need.

Architecture diagrams are the backbone of technical documentation. They show how services communicate, where data flows, and which infrastructure components underpin your system. When a new engineer joins your team, the first thing they look for is an architecture diagram. When something breaks in production, the incident response starts at the same diagram.

Yet many teams store their architecture diagrams in external tools -- draw.io, Lucidchart, or even desktop applications -- detached from the documentation where they matter most. Confluence is where your runbooks live, where architecture decision records are written, and where post-mortem discussions happen. Keeping your architecture diagrams inside Confluence eliminates context-switching and ensures diagrams evolve alongside the written documentation they illustrate.

This guide walks through three ways to create architecture diagrams directly in Confluence, using NGPILOT apps designed for different workflows. Every Mermaid example is copy-paste ready, so you can insert it into a Confluence page and see the result immediately.

Class diagrams are the standard way to model object-oriented systems. They show the classes in your codebase, their attributes and methods, and the relationships between them -- inheritance hierarchies, composition, aggregation, and simple associations. Whether you are documenting a domain model, onboarding new engineers onto a codebase, or collaborating on a design before writing a single line of code, a UML class diagram communicates structure faster than paragraphs of prose.

If your team uses Confluence for technical documentation, embedding class diagrams directly on your pages keeps your design docs next to your architecture decisions, runbooks, and sprint planning notes. With Mermaid Plus for Confluence, you can write class diagrams in plain text and render them instantly, no external drawing tool required.

An ER diagram (entity-relationship diagram) visualizes a database schema — the tables, columns, primary and foreign keys, and the relationships between them. If your team documents data models, API contracts, or system architecture in Confluence, embedding ER diagrams directly on the page keeps the schema next to the prose instead of stranded in an external tool as a stale screenshot.

Confluence has no built-in ER diagram support, so you add it with a Marketplace app. The approach below uses Mermaid Plus for Confluence, which renders ER diagrams from plain text — meaning diagrams version, diff, and search alongside the rest of your documentation.

Entity-Relationship (ER) diagrams are the standard way to visualize database schemas. They show the tables in your database, the columns in each table, primary and foreign key constraints, and the relationships between tables -- one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many. Whether you are designing a new database from scratch, documenting an existing schema for onboarding, or collaborating on a data model before writing migration scripts, an ER diagram communicates structure faster than any amount of prose.

Gantt charts are one of the most widely used visual tools in project management. They give teams a clear, time-based view of who is doing what, when tasks start and end, and how dependencies chain together across a project lifecycle. Whether you are planning a software release, coordinating a marketing campaign, or managing a sprint backlog, a Gantt chart turns a flat task list into a timeline your whole team can read at a glance.

Confluence is where many teams already store their project documentation, meeting notes, and decision records. Embedding Gantt charts directly on Confluence pages keeps your project visuals alongside the context your team needs, instead of burying timelines in a separate project management tool that nobody checks. With Mermaid Plus for Confluence, you can write Gantt charts using plain text syntax and see them rendered instantly on the page.