Top popular Confluence plugins and their replacement

Top popular Confluence plugins and their replacement

Greeting! I’m Dmytro, I manage EvaTeam products. Confluence was paired with Jira, but in Russia we replaced them with our products. And here the problem is that it is necessary not only to make a similar functionality, but also to develop a lot of plugins, which the system could be expanded with.

I already talked about plugins in Jira and their analogues in the article. Now I want to move on to Confluence plugins. Let’s go!

Preface

Confluence is a great tool for managing documents, creating knowledge bases, help portals, and many other tasks. Due to the marketplace, you can greatly expand the functionality of the system. Add the ability to draw flowcharts, approve documents, and more. But we ourselves have previously used “Confu” for our public product documentation.

But since the Australian company imposed sanctions, it was difficult to use all this. Not only does Confluence need to be bought by cheaters, but also plugin developers themselves can introduce restrictions.

Here you can raise the original question for the dispute. Which is better: one vendor that is fully responsible for the software? Is it software with basic functionality that can be expanded through individual plugins, as well as simply by integrating with other products? Because it may turn out that you are supplying the software, but one of the other partners with whom you had close ties may start dictating their terms. If Atlassian wants to return to the market tomorrow, many suppliers from the marketplace can say “No, we are leaving Russia in the bath”. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why the company often adds the functionality of some popular plugins immediately to the main product.

And another small stone in the garden of such a solution is the difficult process of choosing software. There is a separate process for selecting and purchasing plugins behind the purchase of one Confluence. It’s very simple if you have 5 people in the company and you just pay by bank card. And it’s a completely different gloom if you have 20,000 employees and you need to coordinate everything, conduct a pilot and purchase, approve the budget, and so on. In general, such entertainment.

Thank God we’re making EvaWiki as a Confluence counterpart. And we can not invent bicycles, but immediately do the right thing. Therefore, we implemented the functionality of the most popular plugins from the marketplace by default. But at the same time, they left the opportunity to improve the system independently.

Plugins

draw.io

The most popular plugin for Confluence. Used for creating charts, diagrams, and other types of graphics. It has a bunch of tools for creating quality flowcharts, graphs and reports. There are ready-made templates that you can simply substitute your values. In addition, the plugin provides a large collection of predefined shapes and icons that can be used in creating graphics. Also allows users to export graphic images to various formats such as PNG, JPEG, PDF and others. If you understand a little, you can at least draw pictures in it. Very ugly and incomprehensible, but still pictures.

If we often make similar functionality of plugins in our system, then here we integrated draw.io into the system. You can choose to add a graph directly in the editor, a window with draw.io will open, in which we make edits, save and receive the graph embedded in the document. At the same time, everything works in both cloud and server (on-premise) versions.

Gliffy Diagrams

Basically, Gliffy Diagrams is a plugin with the same functionality as in draw.io. Perhaps its interface can be called more modern. But in general, it performs the same function – it builds charts and graphs.

At the moment, this plugin is under development and will be implemented in the near future.

PlantUML

You can make charts in this plugin! But here, of course, there are peculiarities. In general, PlantUML is an Opensource solution that makes visual diagrams from the code. It is used for this UML (English. Unified Modeling Language) – a unified language of graphic description for object modeling of various business processes, org. structures and other schemes/diagrams. Thanks to this integration, Confluence can play with new colors.

If you understand, the tool is very useful and convenient. That’s why we added the possibility to use it directly in the document.

Here, by the way, you can get distracted and reflect on a philosophical question. “Which is better: the ability to choose appropriate tools or an immediately ready-made product?” The marketplace gives you the opportunity to choose from several solutions what you need. At the same time, it lengthens and complicates the process of choosing an appropriate solution. This is especially felt when you need to select several plugins at once. In this, working with one product expands to serve an entire zoo. It is necessary to monitor, update, monitor payment terms. In fact, Atlassian offers an unalternative format of interaction: you bought a product and expanded its functionality with plugins. But if you don’t want to strain yourself with the pain of choosing, then you have no other options.

When the main thing is not checkers

We want to avoid this approach and give choice. After all, there are a number of the most popular extensions for Confluence (and Jira too), which are used by many, if not all, users. Why not add it to the standard functionality and not burden the user?

That’s why we’re moving this way: you can use the built-in functionality of the plugins you’ve been using. Or you can choose others on the marketplace or customize the system yourself.

Table Filter and Charts

In “bare” Confluence you can work with tables. But if you don’t want to work with tables, but want them to work for you, then you need to install plugins. The Table Filter and Charts plugin has become very popular in this regard.

It allows you to apply filters to any table column, summarize and calculate data in pivot tables. You can also create various charts and graphs, use Excel-style tables and predefined formulas. You can also reuse data from other Confluence pages and external sources like Jira. Overall, a very functional, useful and popular tool.

Only in Confluence it needs to be installed separately, and in EvaWiki it is already ready in the basic version.

The basic functionality of the plugin has already been implemented. And with each monthly release, more are added.

Comala Document Management

A very interesting plugin for building business processes for working with documents. Significantly expands the possibilities for keeping exactly the right documentation.

If you maintain important documentation in Confluence that requires a high level of reliability, Comala makes it much easier.

For example, you have public documentation for your customers that contains guides for using your product. Several employees can work on it. One wrote, the second corrected, the third added, and the fourth checked. And all these can be employees of different departments, and sometimes there may not even be specific people, but positions. In order not to get lost and not to release a bad document in every sense of the word, you need the Comala plugin.

An unapproved publication may accidentally become one

With its help, you can build a whole chain of coordination. And then track statuses by stages. Roughly speaking, a document is no longer just some text, but a whole task with its own requirements.

And of course, we added the same to EvaWiki. Now we use this functionality. Very comfortable.

Scroll Viewport

If you keep public records, you probably customized them in some way. It is strange to leave the vendor’s logo and its corporate colors there. Scroll Viewport does help to solve this problem.

With the help of this plugin, you can change the design of published documents and arrange everything in corporate colors. And the UI itself can also be rebuilt as you like. The plugin is not only about changing the color. It has quite a lot of tools, right down to using your JS and analytics.

However, the main functionality of the plugin is to change the color and style of the documentation. EvaWiki now has this functionality available. It will be expanded in the future. However, you can already write your own CSS and change the styles as you like.

Requirement Yogi

If you conduct organized software development, you probably use specifications that describe how a particular function should work and look. In general, this is part of the Agile methodology and you can write a separate story about them. But that’s not what we’re here for.

The Requirement Yogi plugin allows you to link specifications from Confluence with tasks in Jira. And you would know how useful this tool is (if you don’t already know). The organization and speed of development immediately becomes x5. After all, you can visually monitor the work from the specifications directly in the document, where the related tasks and their statuses go. Thanks to this, the developer, as soon as he has questions, can quickly go to the specification and understand what they want from him. Accordingly, the number of cases when they wanted one thing and got another is reduced.

EvaWiki has already started to implement some of the functionality so that you can use it as you are used to in Confluence. We ourselves develop products with this approach to problem solving. We also write speeches and work on them.

Conclusion

These are not all plugins used in Confluence. We have a whole list of them and we are gradually adding them. And besides EvaWiki, we have EvaProject (an analogue of Jira), which also has a lot of these plugins.

Well, nevertheless, we understand well which functionality is needed, which is not, and which will simply wait. It is unlikely that the basic version of the system requires a plugin for greeting colleagues. However, someone designed it, so someone needs it. And if it is very necessary, please. For this, we are also moving towards our marketplace, as well as giving the opportunity to improve the system on our own (or with integrators).

The project was implemented with a grant from RFRIT as part of the “Digital Economy” national project.

Related posts