Introduction
In a bid to contribute more to the Atlassian Community, I took a look at the most recent requests and questions on the Forums. One that caught my eye was a request for a Confluence Macro that would:
“…display on the restricted page exactly who has access (including a breakout of all group members, not just the group name) to create transparency and build confidence in the selected user group that they are posting in the appropriately restricted area.”
I’d never created a Confluence Macro before, and this seemed like a challenge I could meet.
Please note that this isn’t a how-to on creating Macros, but really just an accounting of my experience learning the tool.
Getting Started
The first thing I did was check to see what Atlassian has to say on the subject. Confluence Macros are written in Apache Velocity, which is quite different from the Groovy that I’m used to working with.
All of the functional lines in Velocity start with a #, which makes a Velocity script look like one big page of commented-out code. The truth is that Velocity is very old and pretty clunky. The last news update to the project was