How to deal with templates on Confluence 4.3 and later

Prior to Confluence 4.3, global and space templates were created as simple text with Wiki Markup. With Confluence 4.3 and later, templates began using the XHTML storage format. Unfortunately, this incompatibility cause difficulties for some macros that used simple text-based templates to store simple text. This provided a convenient way to share scripts without using attachments or duplicating scripts.

Examples

1. SQL for Confluence - Users could put SQL scripts into global or page templates.  SQL-165 - Getting issue details... STATUS
2. Scripting for Confluence - Users could put Groovy, Beanshell, or Jython scripts into global or page templates.  SCRP-126 - Getting issue details... STATUS

To accommodate this change in storage format, the handling of this data was changed to look for unformated text in the template. Consider any content that is wrapped in a noformat or wiki-markup (CWP:Wiki Plugin for Confluence) as the plain content from the template. All other data in the template will be ignored.

The incompatibility requires templates that are used for this capability to be updated to surround the text with the noformat or wiki-markup macros. Most standard usage does not employ this technique, however users do use this extensively. To ease migration pains, support has been added for releases previous to Confluence 4.3 to allow the accommodation as well. In this case the noformat macro must be the first and last text in the template.