Display Conditionalized Content (Variants)

Show different variants of your content on your site and allow users to toggle between them.

Scroll Sites lets you to add a Confluence space or a Scroll Document (managed by Scroll Content Manager) as a content source. The advantage of adding a Scroll Document as a content source is that it lets you configure and show different variants of your content on your site. This is ideal if you want to show different content depending on the audience that visits your site.

When you select two or more variants of a document for your site, Scroll Sites will add a variant picker to your site. This picker allows your visitors to choose and navigate between different variants of your site's content.

→ Still not sure what variants are for? Learn about the benefits of conditionalizing your content.

Before You Begin

To publish content with variants to a Scroll site, your content needs to exist as a Scroll Document. This Scroll Document can then be added as a content source to any Scroll site.

To get started, make sure to:

1. Install Scroll Content Manager for Confluence Cloud. You can start with a free 30 day trial.

2. Optional: If you want to unlock the full potential of the variants functionality in Scroll Content Manager, you’ll also need to install the extension app Variants for Scroll Content Manager. You can start with a free 30 day trial.

3. Create your first document. Either from scratch or out of an existing space or page tree.

4. Add a first variant to your document. You’ll get the most out of variants, if you create at least two.

5. Start to define conditional content (you decide which pages or sections of pages in your document will be included in which variant).

6. Create a new or select an existing Scroll site.

Now you are ready to start adding your Scroll Document(s) as a content source.

Selecting Which Variants to Publish (Per Scroll Document)

Once the Scroll Document is added to a site, it will appear as a card in your Content list in the Site settings screen.

To edit the default variant selection for a Scroll Document content source:

1. From the My Sites screen, click the card that has your site’s name.

2. From the left sidebar, click Site Settings > Content. In the Site settings screen, you will find a card per content source that is added to your site.

3. From the card of the Scroll Document content source you want to edit the version selection for, click the arrow icon in the far right of the card or the blue x/x Variants indication. A table of all existing variants for this document will expand.

4. From the variants table, use the toggles in the last column to select or deselect the variants that should be published in your site.

5. Optionally: For each variant you can click the pen icon in the far right of the table to specify the variant name and URL path that should be displayed in the site for this variant.

6. From the Site settings screen, click Publish changes or Save changes in the top right.

Your change will now automatically trigger a new site update (for sites set to live updates) or be applied with your next site update (for sites set to manual updates).

If you have more than one site, you can now add the same content source to that site and just select different variant(s) for that site.

Remove the Variant Path From the URL (Single Variant Only)

When only one variant of a Scroll Document is selected for your site, you can remove the variant path from the URL completely. This is useful if you only publish a single variant of your content and don’t want a variant name to appear in your site URLs.

To remove the variant path:

1. From the My Sites screen, click the card that has your site’s name.

2. From the left sidebar, click Site Settings → Content.

3. From the card of the Scroll Document content source, click the arrow icon in the far right of the card or the blue x/x variants indication. The variant table will expand.

4. Make sure only one variant is selected.

5. For that variant, click the pen icon in the far right and clear the URL path field.

6. From the Site settings screen, click Publish changes or Save changes in the top right.

With your next site update, your URLs will no longer include the version segment. For example, a URL that used to look like this:

https://your-company.scroll.site/your-document/v1/variant/my-article

will now look like this:

https://your-company.scroll.site/your-document/v1/my-article

What happens when you add a second version

As soon as you add a second version to the same content source, every version must have a unique, non-empty URL path again, so that visitors always land on the correct version.

If a single version with an empty URL path is already saved when you add a second version, the content source will go into an error state and you won’t be able to save changes until you provide a URL path for each version.

Navigating a Site With Multiple Variants

If you select more than one variant of a content source for one Scroll site, your visitors will be able to navigate your content using a variant picker.

The variant picker will be automatically added all content source pages for which you have selected multiple variants. Use this picker to navigate between all the content variants you selected for your site.

Switching variants will always land you on the same page in the other variant (if the page exists in the other variant) or on a 404 page (if the page doesn’t exist in the other variant).

Restricting the Visibility of a Variant

Once you’ve added a variant or more to a Scroll site, you won’t be able to control which user or user group sees what variant. That means, everyone who has the link to your Scroll site will see all content that you’ve included.

If you need to control the visibility of your content, we recommend creating separate Scroll sites and add different variant(s) to each site. Learn more about your options on Show Different Content Depending On The Audience .