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How to create a glossary in Confluence?

Letzte Überarbeitung:

Confluence is the ideal place to create a glossary (alphabetical list of terms and meanings). Here’s how to proceed if you want to create a glossary:

  1. Install the Basic Glossary plugin.

  2. Then create a new section.

  3. Click “Next” and you will be given the option to create a “Glossary Space Blueprint”.

The Confluence “Create space” dialog with the entry “Glossary Space Blueprint” circled in green among the other space templates

4. Fill in the required details, like the name and key and then click “Create” to finish setting up the space.

The “Create a Glossary Space” dialog with the fields for space name, space key, labels, administrators and description

5. Now, a Glossary space has been created with a page for each letter of alphabet, like this:

The created glossary home page with one page per letter of the alphabet, listed in the page tree on the left as well

6. If we now go back to the menu bar and click on “Create”, you should be able to add “Terms” to your glossary.

The “Create” dialog with the selected template “Glossary Term”, which builds a page from the glossary term template

7. Add now the definitions and confirm in the following: “Publish”. We have added the definition of “Glossary” in the example.

The editor with the term “Glossary” and its definition, still a draft in the Glossary Test space

8. In the page tree, the entry looks like this:

The page tree in the sidebar, where the new entry “Glossary” appears in bold below the letters

9. We’re not quite done yet, because we should also link the Confluence glossary to other spaces, making it visible and useful for everyone. Click on “Space Tools”, then “Overview” to continue.

The opened “Space tools” menu with Overview, Permissions, Content Tools, Look and Feel, Audit log, Integrations, Document Management and Publishing

10. Here we can see that there is already a category “Glossary”. To make the content we just created, a definition of the word glossary, visible to other spaces and pages, we should now go to another space where we can also access the space tools to add the category “Glossary”.

The space details of the glossary space, where the category “glossary” is highlighted in green

11. Below you can see an area where there are no categories yet. Let’s click on “Edit”.

The space details of another space named Playground, where Categories still reads “(None)”

12. Here, the category “Glossary” is already suggested, so we can add it to the “Categories” for this area by clicking on it and then click on “Done”.

The category settings of the space with the label input field and the suggestions glossary, glossary-term, knowledge-bases and software-project

13. Now when we type a sentence like this on a page and highlight it, we see this button:

A Confluence page with the sentence “What is a glossary?”, where selecting the word “glossary” brings up a small toolbar

14. If we click on it, we will see a definition that we can edit or comment on.

The same page, where clicking the word shows the glossary definition in a pop-up with links to edit and comment

 

For overviews that draw on several pages and stay up to date on their own, use the Page Properties macro.

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