Customize search result page

Question

We use Confluence in a quite unconventional way.

We are building a Product Catalog, based on Confluecne as a CMS. We have created a page tree, where each page corresponds to one product.  And mother page is Home Page of the catalog:

* Home page* Product 1
* Product 2
* ...
* Product n

Everything is customized, to make is as light ans simple for users, as possible. Side and top bars are hidden, same with bread crumbs, and every other button.

We have a problem with seaching, though. From Home Page we want to be able to search through the whole catalog Space (e.g. using labels, page names or context). But using Confluence search macro send us to the separate dosearchsite.action page, that we can not customize.

My question is if we can customize it? Or maybe is there some plugin that can help us (the cheaper the better)?

Changing Main Confluecne Layout is not an option, as we are working with one Space only.

Steffen Burzlaff _K15t_ · Answer

Hi Michal,

in Scroll Viewport you are able to define an additional, custom view for your Product catalogue for your visitors and readers.

Scroll Viewport won't change the Confluence UI at all so your authors still can use Confluence as they do today. The app gives you full control of the Confluence content and allows you to style it with HTML, CSS and modern web-technologies.

In general Scroll Viewport behaves as a common Website with dedicated page URLs, so you are able to incorporate a wide range of elements from web libraries.

This would solve your problem of having clean and structured pages for the readers. Viewport allows you also to create a custom styles search template which you can style the way you want - as already mentioned, without changing the actual search template in Confluence.

The linked page above is created with Confluence and Scroll Viewport another example is the Atlassian Documentation itself.

I hope this is helping you!

Cheers,

Steffen

Diego_88dj6o · Answer

Hello there Michał! Thanks for sharing your project with the Community.

You can sure change the search page. However, this involves dealing with Velocity files. Which can be risky, you could disable a button or straight-up locking up the instance.

Customizing the velocity files does require some programming knowledge and also testing. Which is why this should be first applied on a test instance.

There are other customers who also needed to customize their search pages:

How do I customize the search result page?

Customizing Confluence search results page.

The threads are old indeed, but the principle is the same.

To reach the .vmd files, you can go to Cog Icon > General Configuration > Layouts.

Also, you could try to insert Custom HTML, under Cog Icon > General Configuration > Custom HTML.

The thing is that those changes are applied worldwide to your instance. So the single space customization might not be achievable by these methods.

Further, maybe a theme for Confluence will be helpful for your case. Such as Refined Theme:

Refined Theme for Confluence

Let us know!