Everything you need to set up and look after the glossary. Most sites need about ten minutes of setup and then nothing.
Settings live at Confluence Settings → Apps → Glossary.
1. Setting up
Install the app from the Marketplace. It works straight away — domains, statuses and languages all come with sensible defaults.
If you are moving from Data Center or from the older Cloud app, read MIGRATION
Before you install. One of those paths has a step you cannot take afterwards.
2. What the app can see
The app only ever acts as the person using it. If someone cannot see a space in Confluence, they cannot see its terms in the glossary, in search results, in a macro, or through the browser extension. There is no setting for this and no way to switch it off.
It asks Confluence for permission to read and write pages, labels and page properties, to read space and user names, and to check which groups the current user belongs to. It uses group membership only to answer one question: may *this* person move *this* term to *that* status.
3. The settings page
Tab and what it is for
- Index: The health of the glossary, and the Rebuild button.
- Domains: Subject areas — Finance, Legal, HR.
- Statuses: Your review process.
- Languages: The languages your terms are written in.
- Reviewers: Who may move a term between statuses.
- Highlight: How words are marked inside pages.
- DC / Connect: Moving a glossary in from somewhere else.
4. Domains, statuses and languages
These three lists are what every term is filed under. Edit them on their own tabs.
4.1. The one rule worth remembering
Terms remember their domain, status and language by an internal number, not by name.
- Renaming an entry is always safe: Every term that used it follows the new name.
- Deleting an entry is not: Terms pointing at it are left with nothing to show.
Before it lets you delete anything, the app tells you how many terms are using it.
4.2. Archive instead of deleting
If a domain is no longer in use, **archive** it. Archived entries disappear from the menus people choose from, but terms already using them carry on showing them correctly.
This is almost always what you want. Delete only when nothing uses an entry.
4.3. Colours
Each entry has a colour, used for its label throughout the app. Pick from the palette and the text colour is chosen for you so it stays readable.
5. Statuses are a process, not a list
A status is a step, and the steps are connected. Each status has a role:
– a starting status, where every new term begins
– middle statuses a term passes through
– a final status for terms that are agreed
The Statuses tab shows the steps and how a term moves between them.
6. Reviewers
On the Reviewers tab, choose which Confluence groups may move a term into each status.
Leave a status with no group and anyone who can edit the term may move it there. Set a group, and only members of that group can.
Everyone else still sees the status and its full history — they simply cannot change it.
7. Highlighting
The Highlight tab controls how glossary words are marked inside pages.
You can choose the mark’s appearance, whether matching is case sensitive, and which
spaces’ terms are used. You can also switch highlighting off entirely for the site.
Whole words only, always. *Order* will never match inside *Ordering*.
