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We're obviously biased in thinking Theme Builder is the best way to customise Confluence, so let's take a quick look at your alternatives...
This is by far the simplest method - simply choose from one of the themes that come bundled with Confluence:
Screen grabs of our [About] page taken using Confluence 2.6.2, February 2008. Click thumbnails to enlarge.
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.
The Confluence default theme (shown above) can be customised by editing the HTML/Velocity templates using the "Layouts" option in Site or Space Administration:
This gives you a fairly high degree of control because you can change the way most things look. 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:
If you've got Java developers on-hand, and they aren't swamped with other development tasks, you can create your own Java theme plugin:
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This method gives you 100% control over 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.
Yeah, we're probably a bit biased, but with good reason we're sure you'll agree – and over 1,500 customers in 50 countries agree with us.
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Theme Builder aims to achieve all the benefits of the alternate methods of customisation, plus a whole lot more, with none of the disadvantages...
Why guess what a space will look like with a layout when you can see a live preview?
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The visual layout editor makes the majority of theme customisation trivial:
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Easily customise panel content using wiki notation and macros:
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.
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 from the previous version.
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.