The Confluence Ecosystem team is pleased to announce the availability of two new Forge extensions! Forge app developers can now designate their Global Settings modules to be used as either a “Get Started” or a “Configure” page. These new extensions bring feature parity to Forge from Connect Configure Page and Post-Install Page .
The Get Started page is one which a Confluence site admin can use to provide useful information for how to use the app, tutorials, or other helpful introductory information. The Configure page is one which a Confluence site admin can use to configure app settings and preferences. While each page can only be designated once per app, developers can create additional Global Settings pages and link to them from the primary page if they need more than a single page for Get Started and/or Configure content.
If an app designates either of these pages, a link/button to that page will be shown after installing an app from the Atlassian Marketplace as well as within the app section on the Manage Apps page. Also note that these pages will not display within the Admin settings navigation like is the case with standard Global Settings modules.
To take advantage of one or both of these new extension points, see the Global Settings Forge documentation under the properties useAsGetStarted and useAsConfig.
We are excited that these new extension points will help Forge developers provide a more complete app experience within Confluence. We welcome your feedback!
great that this extensions are now available in Forge! It is an important onboarding feature.
I am quite confused about the fact that both pages do not get a link in the navigation menu. I am wondering why anybody would like their global settings pages only be reachable via those buttons. As a workaround I have just made a copy of the original global settings module to treat it as my Configure Page. But the tradeoff is, the user has to allow access twice for the same page.
Your question is a good one. Before we developed this feature, we evaluated the UX based and also considered how these “special” global settings modules would work compared to regular global settings modules. It was determined that having these pages link from multiple places would be redundant and potentially clutter up the navigation if there were many global settings modules in use by one or many apps. Since the navigation isn’t grouped by app, there isn’t any good context for which app the link would be configuring. The expected workflow would be to see an admin go to Manage Apps and then contextually be able to Configure an app from there.
I’m also tagging @MeganHamilton who is our designer who might be able to provide more UX perspective on this feature.
Not cluttering up the navigation is a good point. I understand that. But wouldn’t it be better to then provide a grouping by apps in the navigation?
I think there are two type of users. Ones who navigate to the Manage Apps to configure any app and some others who look up the admin navigation for app configuration. But now all released forge apps with global settings will lost theirs navigation link if they will use this new feature. I expect customers will be confused by that.
I understand that a “Get Started” page has a different meaning and could provide content which is only important for the first visit. But a “Configure” page is just a global settings page which a customers visits frequently.
Hi @SvenHe, thanks for reaching out! As @AlexWhite mentioned, I’m a designer who worked on this feature. Your feedback on the potential impact of this navigation change is helpful, and we will take this into consideration as we think about any future updates to the navigation for app configuration.