Confluence has an easy way of defining page properties or variables on the page and then building various reports around it, https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/page-properties-macro-184550024.html. Smart Templates takes this to the New Level and allows you to connect these properties with variables inside your Smart Templates (with embedded contents) or directly to Confluence Templates (when Smart Template is set to use the Confluence template as a contents source provider)
Sounds complicated? I believe not. Let me explain...
Consider the following contents that needs to be placed on each of you project page:
And we want to place it on each project's landing page with actual values and later we want to be able to create Confluence page properties reports with a Page Properties Report macro
On our project page we will add another smart template to reference this one and will add a Confluence page properties macro with actual values
You see that the values on the left column are exactly matching the names you see in the template from the first screenshot (but without a $ prefix)
The values from you page properties will be set to a Smart Template result and will render as follows:
And as the values are set in Page Properties we can then have Confluence to build an automatic report over the data from our space
As you can see - it is very easy to use Confluence built-in macro called Page Properties with Smart Templates to enable truly dynamic pages.
And there is more! With How to use Smart templates with ConfiForms you can learn how to make it even more dynamic and alive!