Atlassian Confluence Look & Feel tricks: How to Make Your Homepage More Attractive

Don’t judge a book by its cover? Yeah, right. However, Atlassian Confluence is not a book and tuning its ‘cover’ (i.e. the homepage) might make its look cleaner and more attractive for your team, customers or whoever visits your enterprise wiki. In this post we’ll share a couple of tricks for turning  your main Confluence page into a real eye-catcher.

If you ever visited our Documentation site (that is actually a Confluence 5 instance), you may have noticed that the main page looks different than a standard Confluence dashboard. What we did first was changing the site homepage to the main page of a space named doc.

That gave us more flexibility in arranging content on the main page, since the standard dashboard is not something you can deeply customize. On the contrary, any main page of any space allows you to change layouts, insert images and videos and do whatever you want. We placed large add-on icons that users would click to go to add-on manuals.

However, there was still one problem with our homepage. As we already had a navigation system on the page, the sidebar with the page tree seemed redundant.

One solution could have been to add global styles and hide the sidebar on all pages with the default theme. But we wanted to hide it on the homepage only, we still needed it inside each space. That’s why we wrote a user macro that hides the sidebar. In Administration – User Macros we created a new macro with the following code:

<style>
    .ia-fixed-sidebar {
        visibility: hidden !important;
    }
    #main {
        margin-left: 0px !important;
    }
</style>

We inserted the macro to the page and voilá, the sidebar is not there anymore!

Now, we have a minimalist-looking homepage and sidebars inside spaces for better navigation. If you want to try this in your Confluence and have questions, we’d be happy to help you out, drop us a line or just comment this post.