Page freshness macro

The Page freshness macro renders an inline banner that tells a reader whether the page they’re looking at still matches the version that was last approved through the workflow. It’s the embeddable surface for the broader page freshness concept — a comparison of versions, never a clock — placed wherever on the page you want the signal to land.

Adding the macro

In the page editor, open the macro picker and choose Aura Workflows Page Freshness. The macro drops in as a full-width banner at the cursor, so it usually reads best at the top of the page or under a major section heading rather than mid-paragraph. There are no configuration options. The macro reads from whichever workflow is applied to the page it lives on and re-evaluates on every render.

What it shows

When the page’s current Confluence version number is at or below the version recorded against the last completed approval, the macro renders a green banner with a check icon and the text This page is approved. That’s the steady state for a published page that nobody has touched since sign-off.

The moment someone edits the page, Confluence increments its version number past the approved version, and the macro flips to a yellow banner with a warning icon reading This page is not yet approved. alongside a View last approved version. link. The link opens the approved revision through Confluence’s page-history viewer, so a reader can compare what was signed off against what’s currently on screen. The banner stays yellow until either the page is approved again — which records the new version as approved — or the page is rolled back to the approved version or earlier.

The comparison is purely numeric. There is no time component, no “days since approval” threshold, and no way to configure tolerance. A page that has been edited once since approval is treated the same as one edited fifty times. For a workflow-level lever that does move pages on a schedule, see State expiration.

Pages without an approval yet

The macro only has something to compare against once an approval transition has actually completed on the page. On a page running a workflow that has never reached an approval — for instance, a brand-new page sitting in its initial Draft state — there is no approved version on record. The macro still renders, showing the not-yet-approved banner without the View last approved version. link, since there’s no prior version to point at. Once the first approval lands, the link appears and the banner switches to approved.

If the page has no workflow applied at all, or the underlying workflow data can’t be fetched, the macro renders nothing — it doesn’t take up space on the page or show a placeholder. Removing or detaching a workflow therefore quietly hides any embedded freshness banners without needing to edit the page.

What counts as the approved version

The approved version is the Confluence page version captured at the most recent successful approval transition in the workflow history. Other workflow events — selection transitions, expirations, page-edit transitions, action runs — don’t update it. This is a different value from the one stamped by the Create official version action and surfaced by the Official version macro: the official version is a workflow-managed semver string you control through actions, while page freshness reads the raw Confluence version number directly. The two macros pair well at the top of a published page — one shows the editorial version that approved, the other warns when the page has drifted past it.

Permissions and exports

Anyone with view access to the page sees the banner. The macro has no controls and no input, so there’s nothing to gate beyond page visibility. On a PDF or Word export, the banner renders as the plain text of whichever state applied at export time, capturing the freshness signal in the exported document.

For the broader picture of how freshness fits alongside expiration, see Expiration and page freshness. For the rest of the page-level surfaces, see the Macros overview.