Skinning Confluence with your own look and feel

An article by Glen    2 Comments

I’ve recently decided to move (my very simple) business site over to Confluence. Now Confluence is really a wiki, right? So treating it like a real CMS means you’re going to hit limitations. But Confluence is not “just a wiki”, it’s one awesome wiki! So I’m willing to endure a little pain for my public facing site so I can use the same wiki for my internal docs in all their wiki’d goodness.

The only real problem is the Confluence *looks* like a wiki. The default look and feel for Confluence look something like this:

Certainly not shabby, but it don’t really convey a sense of business identity. Hacking custom themes and templates are certainly possible out of the box (if you don’t mind a little velocity work), but I’m really not keen on copying my custom templates into the actual Confluence WAR file for deployment.

Enter the Adaptavist Theme Builder. This awesome confluence plugin gives you a uber-configurable theme to make your Confluence space look like anything you want!

They’ve gone the extra mile too, giving you lots of stuff that only a geek could want – like custom favicons, custom metadata elements, custom Javascript and CSS imports, a bunch of new CSS classed container elements to style, and the ability to add or suppress tons of standard page elements (like the space name, site name, etc). Really first class effort – and completely free. Check out the Adaptavist site for an example of a Wiki that doesn’t look anything like a wiki!

Anyways, I’ve been working hard to try and make www.bytecode.com.au *not* look like a Confluence site. My mediocre design skills aren’t helping, but it’s already a long way there.

I reckon there’s a market for design people who know how to work with Confluence and can do a cradle-to-grave integration of art and design straight into your public facing site. Theme Builder is probably the bridging tool that could make that possible. Until then, I’ll keep plugin away on my daggy CSS skills and I’m sure I’ll end up with something at least half decent!

Great job, Adaptavist. Theme Builder is just awesome!