Can I have a Forge App running as my team's home page?

[Clifford Dunn]

Hi everyone!

I'm new to using Atlassian Cloud, and my department has been using a self-hosted Confluence server for several years. We had a custom page with custom HTML/CSS/JS (though I really think there are no JS elements...just HTML and CSS). 

It seems like the methods of adding HTML/CSS elements are not very possible in the Atlassian cloud. Is this accurate? My colleague found a method of using an outdated editor within cloud that allows you to manually enter divs and spans, etc. Using this older editor, we can even paste in a CSS style sheet. 

However, this ends up needing to be converted when we preview it, and the conversion removes the ability to insert HTML elements. It looks like we can do a potential workaround by editing the page completely in this old editor and rolling with it. 

But I've also been going through and learning how to use Forge and I'm enjoying the capabilities that are present here. So I went ahead and made a global page app that can replace our landing page. However, I seem unable to find a way to set a Forge app as a home page for our team. 

So I have two questions: 

1. Is using the old editor to create our home page a bad idea? Will this be more unsecure as a result? Will it eventually be completely deprecated and become inaccessible? 

2. Is it possible to use a Forge app as a home page without the need to actually click on the app itself? Ideally, I want to have my team just go to our new cloud site and they can have the mostly same experience they've had on our self hosted Confluence wiki. 

Any thoughts or suggestions here would be most appreciated! I seem to be unable to find anything in the Atlassian developer documentation that would help out here. 

Thanks!

[James Dellow]

The short answer is yes.

My News Board apps work this way (but using Connect, not Forge) - see News Board and News Board Lite. They have an option to use the app as a theme, which replaces the default overview page in a space with the news board page. You can then make that space your Confluence home page. 

I wouldn't use the old editor.