12 Days of Confluence Elements: Day 10 - Children Display macro

Use the Children Display macro to insert a list of a page’s child pages, and their descendants. People viewing the page will only see the links for pages they have permission to view.

By default, the list will show the child pages of the page the macro is on — but you can also select a different parent page when configuring the parameters. The macro can display the child and descendant pages of whatever parent page is specified.

When would you use Children Display macro?

This is useful, for example, if you want to create navigation links on a parent page to its nested pages.

Where is this used in our instance?

You can find Children Display macros on section landing pages such as Graduation & Commencement under “In this section”.

Add the Children Display macro

To insert a macro:

When editing, select Insert from the toolbar
Find the macro by name and select it
Configure it as needed

You can also type / on the page to bring up the same list you'd see by selecting from the toolbar. Continue typing the name of the macro to filter the list.

To edit a macro:

Select the macro placeholder.
Select the Edit icon to open the configuration panel.
Configure the parameters. Your changes are saved as you go.
Resume editing the page, and the panel closes.

You can also select the centered , medium-width , and full-width icons to adjust the width of some macros. Select the trashcan icon to remove the macro.

The page links are dynamic — if additional child pages are published or the page titles are edited, those changes will automatically be reflected in the list.

Configure the parameters

Parameters are options that you can set to control what and how content from the macro appears on the page.

If the parameter name used in Confluence Cloud storage format or wikimarkup is different than the label used when inserting macros using the browser or the slash command, it will be listed below in brackets (example).

Parameter	Default	Description

Parameter	Default	Description
Show Descendants `(all`)	not selected	Select this if you want to display all of a page’s children and their descendants. Links to all the nested pages will be shown, without needing to specify the Depth of Descendants.
Parent Page `(page`)	current page	If the page you’re on is the parent of the pages you want to list, you can leave this field empty. But the macro can display child and descendant pages of whatever parent page is specified. Type to search for a page, by name, from any space. You can also try typing these shortcuts: `'/'` — to list the top-level pages (those without parents). `'pagename'` — to list the children of the specified page. `'spacekey:'` — to list the top-level pages of the specified space. `'spacekey:pagename'` — to list the children of the specified page in the specified space.
Number of Children `(first`)	no limit	This field limits the number of children shown. Leave it empty if you want to show all child pages. If you have a particularly long list, you can shorten it by entering the exact number of child pages to display. Descendants of any child pages shown will still be displayed, if you’ve set the Depth of Descendants to include them.
Depth of Descendants `(depth`)	only child pages	This field controls whether to include the child page’s descendants, and if so, how many levels. If you only want to show the parent’s child pages, either leave it empty, or enter the number 1 to specify one level of page descendants. Enter the number 2 to specify two levels of page descendants (child, grandchild). And so on.
Heading Style `(style`)	none (bullets)	If you leave this field empty, the pages default to a bulleted list. If you’d like the child pages to be formatted as headings, select a heading level. This is also a way to increase the font size. Descendants of child pages, however, will still show up as indented bullets in the normal size and style of text.
Excerpt Display `(excerpt`)	none	If you only want to show page title links, leave this set to “none”. But you also have the option to include a page preview under each page in the list: None - no preview will be displayed Simple - displays the first line of text contained in an Excerpt macro on any of the listed pages. If there isn’t an Excerpt macro on the page, nothing will be shown. Rich content - displays either the full contents of an Excerpt macro (if the page has one) — or the first part of the page content including formatted text, images, and some macros.
Sort Children By `(sort`)	Manual if manually ordered, otherwise alphabetical	Optional. Choose: creation — to sort by content creation date title — to sort alphabetically on title modified — to sort by last modification date.
Reverse Sort `(reverse`)	false	Use with the Sort Children By parameter. When set, the sort order changes from ascending to descending.