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{excerpt}We'reWhat obviously biased in thinking Theme Builder is are the bestalternatives wayand towhen customiseshould Confluence,you so let's take a quick look at your alternatives...use them?{excerpt}

h2. Choose An Existing ThemeBundled Themes

ThisConfluence ishas by far the simplest method - simply choose from one of the themes that come bundled with Confluenceseveral bundled themes:

{section}{column:width=25%}{center}Default Confluence Theme \\ [!thumb_default.png!|^theme_default.png]
{center}{column}{column:width=25%}{center}Left Navigation Theme \\ [!thumb_leftnav.png!|^theme_leftnav.png]
{center}{column}{column:width=25%}{center}Clickr Theme \\ [!thumb_clickr.png!|^theme_clickr.png]
{center}{column}{column:width=25%}{center}...compared to Theme Builder: \\ [!thumb_builder.png!|^theme_builder.png]
{center}{column}{section}
{center}{span:class=smalltext}Screen grabs of our [About] page taken using Confluence 2.6.2, February 2008. Click thumbnails to enlarge.{span}{center}

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 goesIf 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.

h2. Customise the Default Theme Layouts

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

!layout.png|align=center!

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.

There's just a few downsides:

* It's raw HTML markup with lots of intricate Velocity statements thrown in for good measureHowever, as many of our customers have learnt the hard way, there's a lot of risk involved with customising the default layout...

* If you do something wrong, you can break Confluence - an administrators' worst nightmare!
* Each time you upgrade Confluence, the layouts reset to their defaults so- you have to gostart 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 but because they contain lots of Confluence-specific markup even most web developers will struggleover again

h2. 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:

-- pics --

ThisIf methodyou givesneed you 100%absolute control over every last detail, this is the way Confluence looks but is route that gives you that level of control.

However, it's 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.

h2. OrOpen yousource could just use the Theme Builder plugin...

Yeah, we're probablytheme plugins

There's a bitgrowing biased,number but with good reason we're sure you'll agree -- over 1,500 customers worldwide do! ;)

Theme Builder aims to achieve all the benefits of the alternate methods of customisation, plus a [whole lot more|Feature Tours], with none of the disadvantages...

h3. Visually choose a layout

Why guess what a space will look like with a layout when you can see a live preview?

!Layout Chooser^choose-layout-full.png|align=center!

h3. Visual Customisation

The visual layout editor makes the majority of theme customisation trivial:

!colour-picker.png|align=center!

Easily customise panel content using wiki notation and macros:

!panel-content.png|align=center!

h3. 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.

h3. Upgrade Friendly

We've spent a lot of time ensuring that Theme Builder doesn't prevent you from upgrading Confluence. Sometimes a significant change in Confluence (like permissions or an update to one of the bundled libraries, etc.) can lead to Theme Builder being incompatible for a few weeks, but we're always updating the plugin to keep up. Imagine if your in-house team had to try and keep up with the rapid release cycle of Confluence - would you really want their time spent that way?

We've also invested significant time and effort to make upgrades to future major versions of Theme Builder easier than ever before, so almost all settings are automatically converted where necessary should we make any significant architectural alterations to the plugin. Theme Builder 3 and above include automated tools for [importing layouts|Backup Tab] from the previous version.

h3. And the rest...

Theme Builder is the only theme that caters to a wide range of requirements such as [Accessibility], [Flexible Navigation], [Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)], [Stakeholder Benefits] and [much more|Feature Tours].of free, open source theme plugins available for Confluence. To review them, visit the [Confluence Theme Extensions page|http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/CONFEXT/Themes].

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

h2. 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|Feature Tours]! They use Theme Builder because they want to customise Confluence with significantly less pain than the alternatives.

Theme Builder aims to achieve all the benefits of the alternate methods of customisation, and more, whilst avoiding as many of the disadvantages as possible.

In particular:

* It has a proven track record and a [community|Forum] 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 [Bespoke: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] ;)