Changing the Parent of Many Migrated Pages in SharePoint with WikiPakk (Video)
WikiPakk builds the page tree on a SharePoint site from hierarchy metadata that WikiTraccs migrates from Confluence, so migrated pages keep their parent and child relationships. Each page carries a Parent ID that points at its parent, and that is what the tree reads.
This video shows how to move a whole set of migrated child pages under a different parent, in this case the site’s own home page, without moving each page by hand. The trick is to edit the metadata directly so the tree reparents the children in bulk.
Prefer to read, or want to jump to a specific part? Each section below links to the matching moment in the video.
Written, step-by-step version
This post follows the video. For the reference on the metadata fields used here, see Scripting the Page Hierarchy.AI Note
The step-by-step instructions were automatically generated from the video transcript.Only do this when no migration is planned
Only edit the metadata by hand when you will not run another migration or a delta migration for this space. Otherwise WikiTraccs sees the new parent (the site home page) as a migrated page and could overwrite it.
For that case there is a safer way using the hidden hierarchy list, which is not shown in this video. If that is of interest, see Scripting the Page Hierarchy or get in touch.
What this walkthrough covers
A customer asked how to change the home page of a site that holds migrated pages, and how to move the migrated child pages under a new parent. The plan: look at how WikiPakk tracks a page’s parent, then hand that parent’s identity to the site home page so the children hang under it, and finally clean up the old parent so nothing is duplicated.
▶️ Watch from the start · start 0:00 · duration 0:09
Changing the SharePoint home page is the easy part
Setting a new home page in SharePoint is straightforward. In the Site Pages library, open the three dot menu of any page and choose Make homepage. That changes which page loads as the site home. The harder question is about the migrated page tree, not the SharePoint home page setting.
▶️ Watch this part · start 0:09 · duration 0:19
Why the migrated page tree needs more than that
The example is a space migrated from an old local Confluence Server, Testspace Migration Cloud, with the child pages Standard Content, Special Content, and Info Center. When WikiTraccs migrates a space, it also sets the target site’s home page to the migrated space home. Say you want Site Home to be the home page instead, and you want those children to hang under Site Home rather than under the migrated space home.
▶️ Watch this part · start 0:28 · duration 0:49
The tedious way: moving children one by one
There is a manual option. For any page you can open the three dot menu and choose Move to another parent page, which reparents that single item. This works, but once you have dozens of children it gets tedious fast. The rest of the video shows the faster route, which is to edit the IDs the tree relies on.
▶️ Watch this part · start 1:17 · duration 0:20
How WikiPakk finds a page’s parent
To see how WikiPakk knows the parent of a child page, open the Standard Content page, use its three dot menu, choose Show in Site Pages library, then open the page and look at the details. Among the metadata migrated from Confluence there is a Parent ID, and that value identifies the parent page. Change where the Parent ID points and you change where the page sits in the tree.
▶️ Watch this part · start 1:37 · duration 0:45
The plan and the metadata fields to collect
The idea is to move the parent metadata from the old parent page, Testspace Migration Cloud, over to the site home page, so the tree treats the site home as the migrated home. For WikiPakk to treat a page as a migrated page, a few fields have to be set: Title, ID, Parent ID, Sibling Order, and Space Key. These are documented in the Scripting the Page Hierarchy article. First, note the Parent ID that the child pages point at.
▶️ Watch this part · start 2:22 · duration 1:11
Turning the site home page into the new parent
Remove the library filter and find the Site Home page. First change its Content Type to Site Page (transformed by WikiTraccs), which exposes the extra metadata fields. Then set the ID to the Parent ID the child pages point at, set a Sibling Order (0 is fine), and set a Space Key (the exact value does not matter, TM in the demo). Because the site home should be a root page, set its Parent ID to 0, and set the Title to Site Home. After a refresh the tree picks up the change, but at this point the metadata is duplicated, so the old subtree still appears as well.
▶️ Watch this part · start 3:33 · duration 1:35
Clearing the duplicate subtree
To remove the duplicate, strip the identifying metadata from the former parent page, Testspace Migration Cloud. Open its page details and change its Confluence ID, for example by adding a 1 to the end so it no longer matches. Save and reload. The old parent now has an ID that no child points at, so it drops out as a parent and the duplicate subtree disappears.
▶️ Watch this part · start 5:08 · duration 0:41
The result
The child pages still carry their original Parent ID, and that ID now belongs to the site home page, so in the page tree the children hang directly under Site Home. The former parent, Testspace Migration Cloud, has no children anymore. That is one way to reshape the migrated hierarchy by editing the metadata instead of moving pages one at a time.
▶️ Watch this part · start 5:49 · duration 0:32