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Bundled Themes

Confluence has several bundled themes:

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Column width 25% Center Default Confluence Theme Image Added Column width 25% Center Left Navigation Theme Image Added Column width 25% Center Clickr Theme

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Choose An Existing Theme

This is by far the simplest method - simply choose from one of the other themes such as Left Navigation, Clickr or Comments Tab:

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The key disadvantage here is that these themes offer almost no customisation options. You can change basic colours and the Left Navigation theme allows you to add some custom navigation, but that's as far as it goes.

Customise Default Theme Layouts

Image Added Column width 25% Center ...compared to Theme Builder: Image Added

If one of them suits your needs, and you don't require any customisation, you might as well use them.

If you need customisation options, however, the bundled themes are very limited in what they can offer - usually changing colours or maybe adding some basic navigation to the left sidebar, not much else.

It should be noted that a growing number of the bundled themes have now been replicated as Theme Builder layouts which allow you to customise them.

Customise the Default Theme

The Confluence default theme The Confluence default theme (shown below) can be customised by editing the HTML/Velocity templates through the web interface:using the "Layouts" option in Site or Space Administration:

Image Added– pics –

This gives you a fairly high degree of control because you can change the way most things look and work. If you're fairly experienced at using Velocity templates, you can also hard-wire macros in to the theme using this technique.

ThereHowever, as many of our customers have learnt the hard way, there's just a few downsides:a lot of risk involved with customising the default layout...

• If you do something wrong, you can break Confluence . Every single space administrator (including users with personal spaces) can edit the layouts and therefore break them - a support nightmare.- an administrators' worst nightmare!
• Each time you upgrade Confluence, the layouts reset to their defaults so - you have to go through the whole process again, taking in to account any changes Atlassian have made to the default layouts.
• You need HTML, Velocity and CSS skills to edit the layouts - generally a web developer will be required.
• start over again

Create a Java Theme Plugin

If you've got Java developers on-hand, and they aren't swamped with other development tasksbusiness-critical tasks and projects for your customers, you can create your own Java theme plugin:

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This method gives you 100% If you need absolute control over every last detail, this is the route that gives you that level of control.

However, it's the way Confluence looks but is also the most complex and time consuming. It requires the most skilled people - Java, Velocity, XML, XHTML, CSS and JavaScript are just some of the technical skills required.

If you later upgrade Confluence, or want to change the theme design, you'll need to get Java developers in to make any required changes to the theme.

Use Theme Builder Plugin

We're obviously biased in thinking this is the best way to customise Confluence, however organisations in over 50 countries agree with us!

Open source theme plugins

There's a growing number of free, open source theme plugins available for Confluence. To review them, visit the Confluence Theme Extensions page.

If there's one that suits your needs, you might as well use it. Just bear the following in mind:

• Most of them require a specific version of Confluence - they are rarely kept up-to-date
• They don't get the same level of security checking as normal themes - avoid using outside your firewall

So when should you use Theme Builder?

There's a reason thousands of customers worldwide have switched to Theme Builder. Ok, there's lots of reasons! They use Theme Builder because they want to customise Confluence with significantly less pain than the alternatives.– pic –

Theme Builder aims to achieve all the benefits of the other three alternate methods of customisation with none , and more, whilst avoiding as many of the disadvantages ...

Easily choose a layout

With the new layout chooser, space administrators can choose an existing layout quickly and easily - there's even a full preview of what their space will look like if they choose the layout:

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Visual Customisation

The visual layout editor makes most tasks trivial:

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Easily customise panel content using wiki notation and macros:

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Extensive Control

With the ability to add custom CSS, custom macros (including any existing third-party macros), HTML and even Scriptix scripts to theme panels you can fine tune just the parts of the interface you need to instead of having to completely re-work the interface.

Upgrade Friendly

We've spent a lot of time ensuring that Theme Builder doesn't prevent you from upgrading Confluence.

As each new version of Confluence is released, our developers make sure the Theme Builder plugin is fully compatible allowing you to upgrade Confluence without worrying about the theme.

We've also been investing a lot of time and effort in making upgrades to future major versions of Theme Builder easier than ever before, with almost all settings automatically converted where necessary should we make any significant architectural alterations to the plugin. Theme Builder 2.1 includes automated tools for porting layouts from version 2.0.x (see Builder - For System Administrators).

And the rest...

as possible.

In particular:

• It has a proven track record and a community has developed around it
• It's commercially supported and maintained
• It's easier to customise and packed full of useful features
• If you don't want to do the customisation yourself, there's a Theme Customisation service available
• It has a very high tolerance to issues caused by Confluence upgrades

The one thing to be careful of is over-customisation - don't go overboard with all that flexibility! If you do, you'll probably need to read our tutorial on Performance Tuning Theme Builder is the only theme that caters to a wide range of requirements such as accessibility, navigation, return on investment and much more.