Customising confluence velocity layouts - should it be allowed?

JamieA
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September 9, 2012

System admins can customise space-specific velocity templates to make, eg, the view-page layout different.

Belatedly I've realised this is a very bad idea, as when you upgrade, the modified template will be retained, even though the default template has most likely changed. What you'd need to do is diff your changes with the original template, then reapply those to the new template.

As no warnings are giving, most likely you will forget, which will lead to subtly broken pages, or broken plugins. I just spent a day working out why the sticky notes plugin wasn't working.

So what's the question... I guess, should this even be possible? I would say not, it's never going to end well.

Also I think the upgrade should draw attention to customised templates and get you to check them all.

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David at David Simpson Apps
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Marketplace Partners provide apps and integrations available on the Atlassian Marketplace that extend the power of Atlassian products.
September 9, 2012

Jamie, I agree.

Allowing edit of the velocity layouts in admin just feels like a very dirty and very hidden hack. It's worse than JS based DOM manipulation and is easily forgotten and yes, the layout doesn't update on upgrade.

At the very least, the upgrade *should* highlight all the spaces that need fixing and how afterwards. I'm guessing that this sort of hackery isn't tolerated in OnDemand precisely because of this.

JamieA
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September 9, 2012

I'm certain it's not allowed in ondemand... and from now on it's not allowed in my instances either. To be honest mostly I used it to create a docn theme before such a thing existed, now it's not required anymore.

Yes, JS based hackery should at least fail in a more obvious way. My problem was that there was zero indication anything was wrong with the page, except that some meta attributes were not present because they had changed the name of the velocity file that got parsed to produce them.

JamieA
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September 9, 2012

I'm marking your answer as correct. One person agrees with me so we must be correct.

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