Blog

Builder 3.3.1 RC has been released and is available from the Early Access Programme page.

This release includes

• Fixes to the labels and comments code to ensure they work correctly with confluence 2.7 & 2.8
• Ensure that all atlassian resources are included in confluence 2.8 & 2.9
• Allow users to define their own menulink replacements
• Allow builder-show/hide by IP address
• Allow rss feeds to be included in the HTML header section through use of the {blog-rss-feed} macro
• Avoid linking breadcrumbs that do not have a target (eg blog year)
• Update {list-spaces} to be more efficient
• Fix notation guide for blog macros
• Allow alias data to be exported and imported with settings backups
• Upgrade to firebug lite 1.2.1
• Fixes for {webui-list} macro
• Ensure default layouts are used when DEFAULT layout selected.
• Workaround spacekeys not being set on historical content
• Ensure wikimenu strips syle tags
• Consolidate noicon functionality
• Fix toggleVisibility/toggleSidebar menulinks
• Update menuitem notataion guide

After some digging about for a solution, both on our side as well as atlassian, the solution to the problem of exporting menuicons to pdf and word files has been found ... well almost!

Please vote for these two issues, so that we can generate a more useful PDF & Word output: http://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-6919 http://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-6246

We've finally sorted out our license key generator and the keys are now being sent out. If you do not receive your license key in the next few days, please let us know.

Some notes on Confluence 2.8...

Confluence 2.8 has been released and now has much better separation of content and design, making it easier than ever to customise pages within Confluence using Theme Builder's "Custom CSS" options.

Theme Builder 3.0.2 (current stable release) will not work with Confluence 2.8 due to some API changes within Confluence, however Theme Builder 3.0.3 should be out fairly soon.

Any customers who have upgraded their production environments to Confluence 2.8 before testing in a staging environment should contact Adaptavist Support to get a snapshot release of Theme Builder 3.0.3 which will get you up and running, albeit with ugly breadcrumbs.

Adaptavist strongly recommend that customers try all upgrades of Confluence and any plugins in a staging environment before rolling out to a production environment. We've seen a steady increase in the number of customers upgrading the production instances of their mission-critical wikis without doing any testing beforehand - it's not a good way to upgrade your wiki!

Atlassian now provide free Developer or Test licenses for staging environments and Theme Builder will automatically run in "Free Mode" on such installations to encourage customers to test upgrades before releasing them to end-users

It should be noted that we've had a growing number of reports that Confluence 2.8.0 is using quite a bit more RAM and server resources than earlier versions. Our initial tests of the final release are also showing similar issues and we will continue to investigate and provide feedback to Atlassian.

We would advise customers who are not desperate to upgrade to Confluence 2.8.0 to wait for Confluence 2.8.1 before upgrading – let the early adopters find any new bugs and wait for the 2.8.1 bug fix release (always good practice in mission-critical environments).

Thanks to Chris Paquin, you can now view all of the 800+ PNG icons bundled with Builder 3.x online...

Lots of icons! It takes a while to load...

We've simplified our pricing for clustered Theme Builder licenses, upgrades and renewals...

Previously, we had Enterprise Node and Unlimited node licenses - a license was required for each node on a clustered Confluence install.

We've merged these licenses in to a new "Cluster" license that will work for any number of nodes and unlimited users in a single Confluence cluster.

We've done this for the following reasons:

1. There was utter confusion at Adaptavist, our resellers and customers when trying to work out what license was required for a clustered install - in particular, maintenance extensions and upgrades was a nightmare
2. Almost all clustered licenses we sell are for 2-node clusters - having granular node licenses was overkill
3. Existing customers may have noticed our licensing provision is less than responsive - we're simplifying it.

The price is a little higher – clustered installs generate some of the more challenging support requests we get (eg. "we've created 600 theme layouts and the layout manger is running a little slow") so we've doubled our company size (literally) in the past 14 days to handle the increased workload.

The first patch release for builder 3.0 is out, it contains fixes for exceptions thrown by webui menulinks (menu being displayed as markup), stores session data differently (white pages) and numerous other tweaks that inevitably weren't picked up during beta testing.

You can download this release from the Atlassian Marketplace (click on the previous versions link to see all files) or install from the plugin repository.

Judging by some of the support requests we are seeing, there is some confusion about how the builder licensing works.

FREE licenses

Builder will run for free without requiring a license key to be installed on all non-commercial, non-academic licensed confluence installs.

In other words if your install is running a community, demonstration, developer, evaluation, non-profit, open-source or personal license then you do not need a license key.

DEMO licenses

Builder will run in a fully functional, free demonstration mode for 40 days from the date of your confluence license's generation.

If you have a confluence license outside of this period, then you should generate a developer license from your commercial/academic one and use it for the duration of your tests.

Release Celebration

In celebration of the release of Builder 3.0.0 we are giving away a three month unlimited builder license key! See the downloads page for more information

We have extended the Builder 3 Beta license to expire on the 30th April 2008. This should give you more confidence in using the beta.

This license will validate as a commercial license so you should no longer see the evaluation banner at the bottom of the screen.

If you have an active Builder maintenance agreement with us, once Builder 3 Final is released you will be able to get a generated key for Builder 3.

We've had several requests from customers asking if there is a Theme Builder layout that looks like the Clickr theme, preferably a version they can edit to apply further customisations. Well, now there is... Clickr Theme Tutorial

We've released Beta 26 which has a refactored builder-breadcrumbs macro - here's some notes...

Confluence 2.8 will include far more semantic HTML markup than previous versions of the product so as of Theme Builder 3.0 beta 26 we've updated the builder-breadcrumbs macro to output semantic markup that is both compatible with Confluence 2.8 and will also work with previous versions of Confluence that Theme Builder 3.0 is compatible with. As usual, we've added some extra classes to allow custom styling of various elements in the breadcrumb trail.

The new HTML structure for the breadcrumbs is based on an ordered list as follows:

<div class="breadcrumbs">
 <span id="breadcrumb-display" class="breadcrumbs">
  <ol class="breadcrumbs">
   <li class="breadcrumb breadcrumb0">
    <a href="/dashboard.action">Dashboard</a> &gt;
   </li>
   <li class="breadcrumb breadcrumb1">
    <a href="/display/Builder">Theme Builder Plugin</a> &gt;
   </li>
   <li class="breadcrumb breadcrumb2">
    <a href="/display/Builder/Forum">Forum</a>
   </li>
   <li class="breadcrumb breadcrumb3">
    &gt;
    <a href="/display/Builder/Some+topic">Some topic</a>
   </li>
  </ol>
 </span>
</div>

In beta 26 you will need to add a little bit of extra CSS to your Custom CSS as follows:

ol.breadcrumbs {
 list-style: none;
 margin-top: 4px;
}
ol.breadcrumbs li {
 float: left;
}

This will convert the unordered list in to the more normal breadcrumb layout. The CSS will likely be included in the next release.

There will be some additional tweaks in the next beta (which will probably be the release), including a bug fix - for more details keep an eye on: http://jira.adaptavist.com/browse/BUILDER-928

This tutorial shows how to allow a single layout to adapt to a space or page that uses it. This allows you to reduce the number of layouts whilst still allowing space administrators to customise panel content, navigation, menus and colours to their specific needs. Read the tutorial...

Want to know how we customised the theme for our website? Read the tutorial...

Theme Builder 3.0 beta 23 has been released, adding support for Confluence 2.7.