Nested pages & backlinks

Two optional structure features live under Settings → Workspace → Document organization. Both are off by default — an admin turns them on, and turning them off later hides the UI without deleting anything.

Nested pages

With nested pages on, a document can have sub-pages, up to three levels deep. Use it when the container should itself be a document — a runbook whose overview page has per-system runbooks under it, or a handbook with chapters.

• Sub-pages panel — each document’s side panel lists its sub-pages in your order (hover for reorder arrows), with a New shortcut that opens the editor with the space and parent already set.
• Parent selector — the editor gains a Parent page field next to Space and Category: a searchable picker (from 0.79) — recent documents first, type to filter. “None — top level” is always available.
• Breadcrumbs — a sub-page’s breadcrumb shows its full path: Home / Engineering / Incident Response Runbook / Database failover.
• Trees everywhere — space pages nest sub-pages under their parent’s card (long lists cap at 4 rows and fold behind an “N more sub-pages…” link, from 0.77), and each space in the sidebar gets a chevron that expands a page tree. Search results show a hit’s path so you can tell sub-pages apart.

The rules that keep hierarchy sane: a sub-page lives in the same space as its parent; depth caps at 3 levels; cycles are impossible; draft branches can’t nest. Moving a document to another space detaches it from its parent and promotes its own sub-pages to top level — nothing is ever orphaned or deleted, and trashing a parent simply surfaces its children at the top level until it’s restored.

Backlinks

With backlinks on, CompassDocs extracts every internal document link from content automatically on save and shows the reverse view: a Linked from panel on each document listing the documents whose content links to it. Existing content is indexed the moment the toggle turns on.

Like everything else, backlinks respect permissions — documents in spaces you can’t see aren’t listed, and drafts stay hidden from viewers.

[[ link autocomplete

The habit-forming half of backlinks: in the rich editor, type [[ followed by a few letters of a document’s title. A search dropdown opens at your cursor — arrow keys to choose, Enter to insert a proper internal link, Esc to dismiss. Links are stored by document id, so they survive renames and moves.

Over the Claude connector

The Claude connector understands both features: create_doc and update_doc accept a parent, and read_doc reports a document’s path, sub-pages, and backlinks — so “add a sub-page under the incident runbook for the payments service” lands exactly where it should.

Nested pages vs. spaces and categories

Spaces and categories already group documents — nesting is for the case where the container is itself a document people read, link to, and search for. If your content is happy in flat categories, leave nesting off; the picker, search, and backlinks don’t depend on it.