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Starting with Confluence wiki

  • Writing by Rajveer
  • On May 26th, 2008 at 2:14 am

Confluence Wiki
Confluence is an enterprise wiki, a team to collaborate and share knowledge; it is a very easy to use this Java based application. User can add, share and find the content using this wiki. Confluence wiki plays a significant role to increase the ability to retain and manage the knowledge base.

I was new with Confluence since I started working on it from past two weeks for internal purpose with in our team. In fact the organization is already using Confluence from a long time. I just had to add a new section for our team members in the existing wiki with a fresh new design theme. And to perform this task I had started configuring Confluence (evolution version) on my local machine. I was supposed to try my hands and figure out the possibilities to change or create the new theme (In Confluence a new section is called as a new space). Installation process went on pretty smoothly, I was able to run it on Windows XP using WampServer.

Confluence wiki theme

This is where I don’t really love Confluence. A Confluence theme is a bundled as a JAR file which contains all the required pages to present a new theme. I am not sure if there was an easier way to update or to create a new theme and then start checking it live in action. I had followed this one –

  • Copy the respective theme JAR file to a separate location and extract its files there
  • Open the desired files to make the changes
  • After the changes, assemble all the files again in a JAR file
  • Goto administrator – plugin then select the existing used theme plugin
  • Uninstall the plugin
  • Browse to the new JAR file and activated that as a plugin
  • Goto themes then select the newly uploaded plugin as current theme
  • Finally now you should be able to see what changes you have done

Note: Before all these steps please make sure that you are not using the existing JAR file activated as your current theme in your Wiki. If you do not follow this, it can give some unidentified errors.

Whole purpose of this post is to tell people who are new and looking for certain answers how they can edit a Confluence theme. So far with the current Confluence version, I think this is the shortest method to do that. Certainly it wasts a lot of time and becomes very boring and lengthy also. I look forward for a  new Confluence version. They should come up with a more easier way so that people can actually start taking  interest in Confluence themes and also can start contributing by their own. And probably this why I can’t see a any Confluence theme provided as other CMS like WordPress, Joomla etc.

This was just a brief but I have spent my time working on many other issues with Confluence. So please let me know if I can be an assistance to any one of you.

6 Responses

  1. Krapa Krishna July 1st, 2008 at 10:25 pm

    Thanks for the information, I was looking for a way to find out the best solution to deal with Confluence theme. Your post have encouraged me to accept the the fact that there is no other way out :-)

  2. Guy Fraser August 17th, 2008 at 7:21 pm

    Confluence themes are a bit of a nightmare to create – and more importantly maintain. Atlassian constantly tweak Confluence API’s, CSS, functionality, etc., and so the theme also has to be constantly tweaked.

    If you make your own theme, it will break in some way (often small, sometimes catastrophic) with each new release of Confluence.

    Shameless plug: Or you could just install Theme Builder plugin for Confluence :)

  3. Joseph Kern February 17th, 2009 at 8:36 pm

    Well then Theme Builder it is!

  4. David February 24th, 2009 at 9:32 pm

    Theme Builder breaks with new releases of Confluence and is produces very poor themes

  5. gabriel nagmay (dot com) | Archive » Confluence Wiki and the Pains of Theming July 22nd, 2009 at 5:24 am

    [...] far, the best advice came from this blog post that talks about building/rebuilding a theme [...]

  6. Christian November 13th, 2009 at 7:16 am

    Building themes is really not that easy but there is a module call themebuilder from adaptavist. it makes your life much easier. We have done some theming on our touch screen support site. http://support.interelectronix.com
    Everything you see there is done by Adaptavist theme builder.
    Happy themeing

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