Atlassian Confluence Look & Feel Tricks: Turning Off Table Sorting

In the previous Confluence How To posts, we focused on the look of Confluence proper. And now we will show you what can be done with your content. Specifically, we are going to share a couple of tricks that can be useful for turning off table sorting in Confluence. By default, there’s no standard way to do that for certain tables which can be painful since some tables don’t make any sense once sorted.

Confluence provides the way to disable the Confluence Sortable Tables plugin though. However, this could be overkill, since sometimes sorting may come in handy.

One of the workarounds might be removing the standard header row and mimicking it with a highlighted first row with bold text in it.

However, if you need the standard header row for some reasons, you may want to insert an empty row right after it and merge all cells in this row. This will prevent the table from being sorted. In fact, if your table contains any merged cells, it can’t be sorted, here we added a dummy row for a nice table look and data consistency.

Another solution might be to add an empty column and merge all its cells with the column before  it. Your table will look like the original one and the number of rows won’t change, however, you should have time and patience for merging cells for each row, so this makes sense only for short tables.

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Atlassian Confluence Look & Feel Tricks: Tweaking Page Titles

In on of the previous posts here we showed you how to change the look of the Confluence homepage. Now let’s see what can be done about normal pages. Below is one of our Documentation pages. What we want to do is change its title font and get rid of the line showing page changes (byline).

To do that, select Look and Feel in Space Tools  on the space sidebar and go the Stylesheet tab.

To change the page title font to Tahoma and increase its size to 50px, we add the following lines to the space stylesheet. Note that space stylesheets override the global stylesheet and the changes made in a space stylesheet apply for all pages in this space.

h1#title-text {
 font-size: 50px;
 font-family: tahoma;
}

Ok, now we want to hide the byline and make it pop up only when hovered over. For this, add the following:

.page-metadata ul {
 visibility: hidden;
}
.page-metadata:hover ul {
 visibility: visible;
}

After saving the stylesheet and reloading our page, we get the page that looks like this.

The font has changed and there’s no visible byline unless we move the cursor over it.

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