Are you using your wiki for documentation? Atlassian developer extraordinaire, Jens Schumacher, announced the availability of the Confluence Documentation Theme back in December last year. With the release of Confluence 3.2, it’s now a bundled plugin. Let’s take a deeper look at how it works and how you can customise it for your needs.

1. Left Navigation Panel

By default, the left navigation panel includes a pagetree of all the pages in the space. This makes it easy for visitors to navigate throughout the space.

The Documentation Theme’s configuration options give you complete control over the panel’s contents. The image below is from Freedom Information System’s Confluence powered intranet. They have decided to use the left navigation panel to provide links to important ‘Places’, ‘Tools’ and ‘Requests’ to make it easy for their employees to find what they are looking for.

2. Header

The theme also allows you to display a custom header across all pages in the space. This is a great way to get important messages and announcements in front of more eyeballs. I’ve been using this feature in the Confluence Evaluator Resources space on Atlassian’s public instance of Confluence to inform visitors of the recent Confluence 3.2 release.

3. Footer

Lastly, the theme also allows you to define a custom footer that is displayed on all pages within the space. The footer is a great place to provide static links relevant to the target audience of the space’s content.

Try it out now!

Take an interactive tour and learn how to use Confluence for documentation in the Confluence sandbox. Or, create a new space using the Documentation Theme and play around with the theme’s configuration options.

Not using Confluence 3.2 yet?

Not to worry! You can download the Documentation Theme from the Atlassian Plugin Exchange. It’s compatible with Confluence 3.1 + and supports the following browsers:

• IE7
• IE8
• Safari 4
• Firefox 3.5+
• Google Chrome