Customize new Confluence dashboard

[Jan Szczepanski]

Hello community,

I currently try to adapt the new Confluence dashboard (Version 5.9.9), which is unfortunately still written in messy velocity. My goal is to keep the left panel with all its information, like favorite spaces, recently updated, etc., but want to get rid of the not usable 'All updates' stream, which currently shows the updates of all our 900 employees (thumbsup).

Next goal is to use this space for the "Welcome Message" template to display some really important information, like blog posts of the management, corporate communications, IT announcements, etc..

Please don't suggest the custom dashboard add-on, which is great, but not usable in regards to the left panel.

What I found out is that the whole dashboard will be loaded by just one command in the velocity template (Global Layout):

$!dashboardWebPanels.get(0).getHtml({})

Removing the following lines, has also no effect to the dashboard.

<div class="dashboard-group right wiki-content">
    $helper.renderConfluenceMacro("{recently-updated-dashboard:showProfilePic=true}")
</div>

It feels like, the velocity template (Global Layout) is still the old one, and the first mention loc loads the new dashboard from anywhere, hardcoded in one of the tousands of .vm file on the server.

@Atlassian: Please create a dashboard, which can be adapted like a normal page, so that we can use the Confluence Dashboard as a central information service!

Thanks for your help. 

Regards,
Jan 

[Lars Swart]

What does your Dashboard look like now? 

I'm on the run for a good solution that solves this problem.

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-41720