What is a "space"?

Confluence uses "spaces" to organize content within a wiki. Global spaces are areas on the site into which you can group content items (pages, attachments, news, etc) for a specific topic. These spaces are specific, defined, and equal in that no space is given greater importance over another. Perhaps the best way to think of a wiki powered by Confluence is like a filing cabinet. The cabinet itself is the entire website. The spaces are the drawers of the filing cabinet. They are distinctive from each other and hold files or pages within them. Each space can can have its own layout, content, news items, navigation, and access control settings. When a space is created, a Home page is also automatically created for the space. This Home page is in within the newly created space.

See all of the spaces on caGrid.org: http://cagrid.org/dashboard.action

What are "children" and "parent" pages?

To organize pages, Confluence uses a hierarchy system. Every page that is created on the wiki is created within a space. Pages can be children, parents, or both. Once a page is created, it becomes a "child" of that space and of whatever page that was being viewed at the time of creation. However, it can also be a "parent" page if a new page is created under it (i.e. a new page is created while it is being viewed by the user) or a page is specifically moved under it. Pages without parents that exist in a space are called "orphan" pages.

For example, look at the site map for the Community space:

To view the site map for any space, select Space --> Site Map from the menu links at the top of every page. You can also rearrange the children and parent pages in the hierarchy from the site map by clicking and dragging the pages.

Here you can see the Home page for the Community space at the top. The Home page also has several pages under it such as "Affiliates" and "caBIG Overview". The Home page is the parent page to these children pages. You can see that "caBIG Overview" is also the parent page to 3 other pages: caBIG 1.3 Production Grid, caBIG 1.3 QA Grid, and caBIG 1.3 Staging Grid. Having this hierarchy usually does not affect the actual page content. However, it does help organization within the space. For example, in some spaces, there is a Documentation page that has the User's Guide, Administrator's Guide, and Developer's Guide as children.

Although, the hierarchy of children and parent pages will not effect content, it could affect certain macros such as {scrollbar}, which allows users to go to the next or previous page, or the parent page. This is particularly useful in tutorials. In these instances, page editors must be aware of the location in the hierarchy of pages containing steps so that the pages/steps are arranged in the proper order.