Can Users Edit Individual Sections Within a Page?

Some wiki software allows the editing of sections within a page (sectional editing). This functionality is currently not available in Confluence, but we are looking to include it in a future release. This issue is being tracked on the Confluence JIRA project: CONF-5913.

In the meantime, for pages that are getting long enough to be hard to edit in a single block, you can get an approximation of sectional editing by using the {include} macro. For example:

h3. [Section One] ([edit|///pages/editpage.action?spaceKey=SPACE&pageTitle=Section One])

{include:Section One}

h3. [Section Two] ([edit|///pages/editpage.action?spaceKey=SPACE&pageTitle=Section Two])

{include:Section Two}

The links to the edit pages can be simplified by using the {link-to:page edit} macro available in David Peterson's Linking Plugin.

Technical Stuff

The problem lies in the complexity of Confluence's wiki markup. We made a couple of proof-of-concept implementations of sectional editing as part of our "ShipIt Day" program, and while it's quite easy to come up with a solution that works with 90% of pages, there are a lot of edge-cases where it's actually quite hard to determine precisely where a given section starts and finishes.

Next time we perform a significant overhaul of our wiki markup processing engine, we'll be looking specifically to add functionality that will make sectional editing work properly.