Themes define a look and feel for Confluence. Confluence ships with several themes that you can use, such as the dafult theme and or the left-nav theme. Theme plugins, on the other hand, allow you to create your totally customized look and feel. A theme can be applied to an entire Confluence site or to individual spaces. Creating a new theme consists of two steps:
There are several other themes that you can use as examples to learn from and extend:
Hi,
could it be possible to get the css include instructions visible as soon as possible?
I am in the middle of deploying 1.4 and would still need to edit the site wide and some specific .css files related to the theme
Lauri Siljamäki

Posted by at May 25, 2005 03:58
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Lauri,
While the CSS include page is coming, have a look at the livesearch plugin included with the Confluence distribution. The way it bundles JavaScript is the same way you would bundle CSS into a theme plugin, using a <resource> tag.
Cheers,
Mike

Posted by mike@atlassian.com at May 25, 2005 10:07
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Two questions. First I was on this page but not logged in. I clicked the login button from this page, shouldn't I be redirected back to this page after I login? Second question. From a theme the decorators in the theme like page.vmd can you call a confluence plugin? Not a velocity macro but a confluence plugin. I tried the normal <bracket>plugin name</bracket> (I tried putting the brackets in there but got Unknown macro) like you would use it in your wiki.

Posted by npoore at Jun 22, 2005 11:38
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Strange. When I logged in, Confluence properly redirects me back to this page.
Yes you can call confluence macros from a decorator. Use:
$helper.renderConfluenceMacro("{color:red}red text{color}")

Posted by dave@atlassian.com at Jun 29, 2005 18:15
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Could I ask where is the best spot to find Theme plugins? There was no theme plugins included with the eval version and I don't see any central atlassian repository for theme plugins anywhere. Thanks

Posted by doggy@doggy.com at Aug 17, 2005 22:10
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There source code for our default themes are bundled in the evaluation version. You have to build them and install them yourself to use them. (I've patched our next major version so that these are built and installed for you).
These themes can be found in the 'themes' directory in the Confluence download zip. Cd to this directory and run this command:
> ant build -Dtheme=<specifynameoftheme>
I assume you have ant installed. If not you can download it from here
Cheers,
Dave

Posted by dave@atlassian.com at Aug 22, 2005 01:21
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The tabless theme is throwing an error of not findingthe vewattachments action in /pages?

Posted by at Aug 22, 2005 14:03
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Filed an issue for this:
http://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-3848
Will fix for next release. Thank for pointing it out.
Cheers,
Dave

Posted by dave@atlassian.com at Aug 24, 2005 03:10
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Does Confluence include support for other languages (such as German or Simplified or Traditional Chinese)? I was assuming that this would be provided as a theme.
Also, is Confluence able to cope with Unicode text (such as Chinese fonts)?

Posted by andrew.mole@arup.com at Nov 10, 2005 22:55
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At the moment we support Chinese characters in pages and page titles. What you can't do yet is 'translate' Confluence into another language - by this "Add Comment" would read "Commentez Ici" in a French version.
However, this will be done soon. We are currently working on the final localisations for JIRA (supports 10 languages right now) and then we will move onto Confluence. We're hopeful this will be in 2.1 or 2.2.
Cheers,
Jens

Posted by jens@atlassian.com at Nov 13, 2005 21:34
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Guys,
I always felt that one thing in Conflucence is somehow missing, but before I saw adaptivist.com I didn't know what I missed. This is simply TYPOGRAPHY.
If you look at Confluence user interface, it looks very modern and pretty. Once you become to work with the Wiki pages on day-to-day basis, you realize that they are not that simple to read. It's because of the font. The default font used for Confluence is simply not meant for reading on the screen longer texts. When I entered Adaptivist site, I immediately realized, what is the benefit of their scheme. They provide modified CSS which looks great and moreover is more readable. Just look at the default font compared to Confluence default.
I wonder guys, if you can think of improving the default scheme, by changing the CSS, and allowing for more readable font, headings, etc. It's relatively minor change, but will have a big impact on the buy-in from customers. My customers (internal departments in my company) are concerned because of readability of Confluence standard font. Please do not take it as rant, I'm pretty serious. I have identified it as major flaw when I present this solution to my customers. Can one of Confluence guys comment on this?
Michal.

Posted by mszklano at Dec 21, 2005 16:07
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I am writing a new theme and basing it on the tabless theme. I have got it almost complete except for one last thing I can't figure out: How can I include notation-quick-help on the edit page screen? The tabless theme does not show it and I have not been able to find how it gets included in the standard theme.
Greatly appreciated...

Posted by ashmaurya at Feb 02, 2006 16:54
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The following code is responsible for displaying the quick help. You will have to integrate it into your page.vmd. This part is used for all kind of help sections, not only on the edit page.
## INFO PANEL FOR ANY PAGE
#if ($infoPanelRequired == true)
<td valign="top" id="helptd" style="display:block; width:$infoPanelWidth;">
#infoPanel(true true true true)
</td>
#end
Note that the table cell tags are due to the surrounding layout. You might have to change/remove them to display it nicely in your theme.
Cheers,
Jens

Posted by jens@atlassian.com at Feb 08, 2006 00:32
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Re: Michal's comment above, I agree.
I would like Confluence much more if it were easier to get at the styling. One thing that I use is a left-hand nav of my own choosing – meaning one that's not just dynamically generated lists, but "static" links to things like "Contact Us", or links with supporting text, like
Edit Publications
Change the status of a publication
or add a hyperlink to the PDF
Also, I think readability could be improved by a two-column layout in some places.
Lastly, I'm not so keen on the performance of the adaptivist.com Blender – I'm using Safari with a very fast connection, and it hangs and does some weird styling thing, then "jumps" into place with the horizontal nav where it should be...odd.

Posted by amyoung at Mar 03, 2006 17:43
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Also nice would be a gallery of pages styled with different colors and decorators – after a few hours of surfing, I can't really find anything...

Posted by amyoung at Mar 03, 2006 17:45
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The performance issues are down to this: http://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-5418 - it affects a growing number of plugins (themes, macros, etc). That said, we do use far too many graphical plugins on our website Have you tried Firefox? It's a bit like Safari, but without the bugs 

Posted by gfraser at Mar 03, 2006 18:00
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I'm interested in using it for a website, so I can't really dictate what browsers our site visitors will use...
Thanks for the feedback!

Posted by amyoung at Mar 03, 2006 18:05
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There are a couple of bugs with the menus in Safari so any feedback you could provide would be extremely useful in helping us fine tune the theme.
Regarding navigation bars, or "column layouts", we're already working on that feature, but it'll be a while yet because we're busy with some new plugins for ourselves and our clients.
Any votes for CONF-5418 are most appreciated 

Posted by gfraser at Mar 03, 2006 18:23
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Do you have any examples (perhaps from other software or websites) that you could show us?
Also, are you from the University of Illinois? 

Posted by gfraser at Mar 03, 2006 18:50
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I will add some feedback tomorrow.

Posted by amyoung at Mar 03, 2006 18:54
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If you're using the Left Nav theme, you can add headings and links to your "Navigation Page" and I think they become part of the menu at the side - is the menu in CODEGEIST:Entries 2006 the sort of thing you are after?
From vague memory, David Peterson posted that the syntax is something like:

Posted by gfraser at Mar 03, 2006 18:55
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Here's perhaps something similar: http://www.csszengarden.com/ You can click on the links under "Select a design" to see a new skin/theme/style. (Yes, I am from UIUC.)

Posted by amyoung at Mar 03, 2006 18:56
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So many tables for layout are a bit of concern to me, too. I know I can just undo them, but a DIV-based structure would be preferable. (I envision having all kinds of styling labor if we go with Confluence...)

Posted by amyoung at Mar 03, 2006 18:59
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Yep, they can be a pain. In a future version, there's only one table in the whole theme (for compatibility with certain browsers when showing columns / nav bars). We should probably move this discussion to email: gfraser@adaptavist.com 

Posted by gfraser at Mar 03, 2006 19:03
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Yes, thanks! I will give it a try. (You should write an O'Reilly book about "Confluence Styling: the missing manual" )

Posted by amyoung at Mar 03, 2006 19:03
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I am a very freshman to this Confluence thing, so maybe my questions are very stupid. Please bear with my ignorance. My first question is that: I have chnaged in /themes/leftnavigation/src/etc/templates/leftnavigation/includes/navlinks.vm file to set 'Browser Space' to 'Browse' and 'Add Content' to 'Add Page'; in fact very simple thing, just some wording in display. After thatI have Confluence restarted and navigate a left navigation theme space, but nothing changed there. Anything I missing here? This is kind of urgent, so any help and suggestion are highly appreciated.
Thanks,
Ning

Posted by zhu@astreetpress.com at Mar 24, 2006 21:40
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You have edited the source for the theme, but not rebuilt it into a replacement JAR. Here's how to do it:
- Open up a command line / shell
- Navigate to your /themes/ directory
- Type ant -Dtheme=left-navigation build (note: you will need ant installed)
- Copy the /themes/left-navigation/dist/themes-left-navigation.jar file to /confluence/WEB-INF/lib
There are other routes to get the same effect, but that should get you going.

Posted by dhardiker@adaptavist.com at Mar 25, 2006 04:23
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Is there more comprehensive documentation on writing themes for Confluence? For example, the '$mode ' variable seems to be a variable defined by Confluence and can be used by the decorator page to determine what type of page is being rendered.
Are there other global variables like this? (i'm assuming there's one to a username, permissions credentials, context, etc. but I can't seem to find them documented).
Thanks!

Posted by andrewj628@gmail.com at Mar 28, 2006 21:49
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For some reason, my themes-related files aren't in my confluence root directory (which also holds decorators/ and dashboard/, just for reference). Should they be? (They're in the home directory where I unzipped my tarball.) Currently, when I edit the themes (like 'tabless') it doesn't influence the wiki pages. I wonder if moving the themes/ directory would help. Thanks for any suggestions.

Posted by amyoung at Apr 19, 2006 16:21
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Amyoung,
Confluence themes are stored individually as jar files in the directory 'confluence\WEB-INF\lib'. Editing the themes hasn't had any effect yet because you need to have Apache Ant create a jar file from the updated theme directory, then copy the jar file into the lib directory. Check out the instructions at the address below
http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DOC/Deploying+the+theme+as+a+plugin
Hope that helps.
David

Posted by david.soul@atlassian.com at Apr 20, 2006 00:50
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Can fully customised colour schemes be created? From the documentation above, it looks like there are only a few specific things that can be altered by a colour scheme. With the Builder theme we'd like to have a much wider array of settings, not just the default Confluence colours. Also, once a custom colour scheme is defined, how do we then get hold of the settings so as to use them in the CSS we output?

Posted by gfraser at May 03, 2006 20:42
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Though the documentation concentrates on the colour-scheme element to get users started, themes can extensively modify your page using decorators. You can modify the layouts on a per-page or global basis. For example, you can modify the printable layout on the admin screen, you can export that modification across Confluence as a Velocity file bundled in a theme plugin. To apply theme, bundle it as a plugin and select under Administration -> Themes to override the existing decorators.
Hope that helps
David

Posted by david.soul@atlassian.com at May 10, 2006 18:23
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Hi David,
My question was more in relation to the next version of our Builder Theme - we've been adding a vast array of new features for version 2.0 and wanted to set colours of the new panels (sidebars for example) using the "Colors" option in site/space admin.

Posted by gfraser at May 12, 2006 13:55
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I'm having an issue with the leftnav theme. I can't get it to hide children. If I comment out render children then it will hide them on all pages except ones linked off the left navigational menu. Is there any way I can get around this?

Posted by besmail at Oct 31, 2006 13:37
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This question is under discussion in the forums: http://forums.atlassian.com/thread.jspa?messageID=257236566

Posted by don.willis@atlassian.com at Nov 09, 2006 23:01
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I found out, that some variables like $mode are explicit set to a value by another decorator (vm). A good explanation which objects are available in the different decorators would be great!

Posted by f.marx@enbw.com at Dec 08, 2006 08:16
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