Branded Templates

Question

Hello all, I wanted to ask the community if anyone had any idea of how to create customized, branded templates. We are currently using Confluence as a Knowledge Base and a lot of the documents we create, must abide by our company's branding policies.

* A big part of branding is to have an editable header that will contain the document name, audience it is intended for and the company's name. As such:

* The body of the document is pretty standard.
* The footer will need to contain a copyright warning.

I tried to create a new template, but the header part is not customizable. Does anyone have any recommendations or any tools they might have used to create more customized templates?

Much appreciated!

chris_y0yz6c · Answer

Hi @Zoriana Bogutska_Kolekti  ,

Thank you for your suggestions.

I looked at the templates page in your second bullet point. Given the content is centred on the page, I trust this app works with the new editor and not the old one, so at the moment that won't solve our problem.

To be fair, I haven't checked the new editor in years - but your comment has inspired me to check:

* Create a new page
* Put an Excerpt macro on the page
* Put a Table of Contents in the macro
* Add some section headings - they appear at top of page (in the TOC) while I'm editing
* Save
* Copy the page to create a second instance and change the section titles
* Create a new third page
* On the third page, add the "insert excerpt" macro - twice - linking back to those two new pages

Result?

Third page shows no content.

Go and review either of the first two pages, and actually, even though the section titles appear within the TOC while editing the page, no TOC appears while viewing the published page.

I do believe this was exactly the feedback given to Atlassian as soon as they brought out the new editor (along with complaints about tables and images). Tickets were raised. Dozens of people protested. Atlassian ignored the community for years. Eventually they commented but basically have done nothing. Atlassian has proved time and again they are not actually interested in connecting with its community. They send out emails requesting feedback and say they read every one - but they do not respond to anyone and they don't address the issues raised.

So I am sorry to say that even though you say their new editor is constantly being updated with new features, no: they still haven't restored the basic functionality they broke with that editor. Honestly, they really don't care what their community thinks.

Oh yeah - I remember one of the biggest complaints: you cannot create a text link to download a document. I re-tested this just now: go to the page attachments, drag a document from my desktop to there. Go back to the page and edit it. Write some text. Highlight some of the text. Hit the "link" (chain) icon in the toolbar to insert a link against the highlighted text.

*Still* - after five years - your only option is to paste a full URL. Now they show you recently viewed pages to speed up that process, perhaps, but I cannot link to the file I uploaded to the attachments area.

This is absolutely basic fundamental HTML functionality from the 1990s and they haven't implemented it within 5 years of this new and "better" editor. Instead, they say to place the file into the content ... which results in a massive icon in the middle of your page.

Really, the new editor is a joke and deserves the name Kindy Konfluence that people started calling it. Such a shame that they had a massively powerful editor and threw it away. More of a shame that no other company has picked up on that and re-engineered the features of the prior Confluence editor. The proper editor.

Zoriana Bogutska_Kolekti · Answer

Hi @chris I understand your frustration.. I remember how tricky it was when I had to move documentation from the old to the new editor..

Here are some workarounds you can try:

* In the new editor, create a snazzy template with your branding, then copy the content from your old pages into it.

* Take a look to apps from marketplaces, e.g. Mosaic app offers content formatting macros that let you blend your custom branded elements with Confluence's built-in features. Here is the list of templates offered in this app (this app was developed by my team)

* The new editor has some great features the old one lacked. Think real-time collaboration, better search, and a more intuitive interface. Plus, it's constantly being updated with new features. You can learn more about them here: https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/features

Keep letting Atlassian know what you need – maybe they'll bring back some of those old favourites.

Good luck finding a solution that works for you

chris_y0yz6c · Answer

I'm not sure how best to identify the editor. When you hit the Create button in Confluence Cloud now, it produces a page using the "new" editor - which has been in play now for several years. Content on that page is "chunked" and centred (left-right) on the page (with very wide margins either side).

Prior to that, content was left-justified and filled the entire page. If you still have pages that were created in the old editor you are able to copy (clone) them in order to create new pages using that same editor. The old editor had far richer features for tables, image formatting and more. To add a macro with the old editor you would type a left curly brace and then the macro name. In the new editor it uses the forward slash key.

The old editor had a table of contents macro and also had excerpt and "excerpt include" macros. Combined this meant you could aggregate the TOCs from multiple specifically-chosen pages into a single page. The TOC macro had an option to specify whether links within the TOC should be absolute URLs or relative. Setting them as absolute meant you could build a targeted index of all your selected pages which was infinitely more useful than Confluence's own search, Atlassian in its infinite wisdom decided the "new" editor was the way to go and that removed all of these decent features. Many people protested in support requests and termed the new editor "Kindy Konfluence" - a web search should find those complaints from dozens of people.

We have hundreds, if not thousands of technical pages that make use of the features that were available in the old editor. We avoid using the new editor. I need to prepare a set of policy documents that follow our company's branding standards. The old editor has an option to export a page to Word or PDF format, but the manual work of exporting a policy document following each update, into Word, then manually applying branding, is not worth it. I'm being asked to find a way to utilise a branded template or else move to a different editor.