Introduction
At times of exporting content from Confluence, you may find yourself in a situation where a date stamp is required in the output files. Depending on your process for exporting content, by default, Confluence doesn't export time data (created or last updated) through its native means. If you have the budget, there are a number of plugins that can provide you with a macro to use in your documents but if you find your budget is tight, you can use the following code to create your own user macro to obtain a document's last updated date.Required skills
You should be comfortable and/or knowledgable with the following:
- HTML
- jQuery
- Creating user macros in Confluence
- Modifying page layouts and space layouts in Confluence
Creating an user macro to display the last modified date
To create an user macro that display the last modified date, you can copy/paste the following code into your instance of Confluence:
Macro name: last-modified
Macro title: Last Modified
Description: Displays last modified date of the document.
Categories: Reporting
Macro Body Processing: No macro body
## @noparams
<span id="lastModifiedDate" style="font-size: 0.7em">Last Modified: $action.dateFormatter.formatDateTime($content.lastModificationDate)</span>
This simple little macro grabs the last modified date from Confluence and will display the value wherever you insert the user macro on your document. The font size is made to be purposely smaller so it won't be to noticeable on your document.
Modify layouts
If your process of exporting content includes the rendered HTML document, then instead of inserting a macro on every document can be replaced by updating the space layout with a little jQuery function to obtain the last updated date and insert it into the body of the wiki content element.Note: Modifying the Content Layout of a space can be dangerous. If you remove a line from the Page Layout, you could corrupt the space and possibly make Confluence unstable. Use this method with care.
If you are using the Default Theme, insert the following code in Page Layout (Space Tools > Look and Feel > Layout > Create Custom under the Content Layouts in the Page Layout section) after the page setters:
<!-- last updated insertion -->
<script>
$(document).ready(function() {
$('div#main-content').append('<span style="font-size: 0.7em;">Last updated: ' + $('a.last-modified').text() + '</span>');
});
</script>
<!-- end last updated insertion -->If you are using the Documentation Theme, insert the following code in the footer of the page layout:
<!-- last updated insertion -->
$(document).ready(function() {
$('div.wiki-content').append('<span style="font-size: 0.7em;">Last updated: ' + $('a.last-modified').text() + '</span>')
});
<!-- end last updated insertion -->
This method of inserting a last modified timestamp is, IMHO, the easiest and safest way to add a timestamp to every document in a space.
