Documentation for Confluence 4.1.x. Documentation for earlier versions of Confluence is available too.

Skip to end of metadata
Comment: Corrected links that should have been relative instead of absolute.
Go to start of metadata

If you are a Confluence Administrator, you can customise the global dashboard, affecting the way all users will see the dashboard.

Confluence users can customise their view of the dashboard too. See the user's guide.

 

(warning) The information on this page does not apply to Confluence OnDemand.

Sending Users to a Space Home Page instead of the Dashboard

See Configuring the Site Home Page.

Editing the Top Left-hand Section of the Dashboard

See Editing the Site Welcome Message.

Editing the Bottom Left-hand Section of the Dashboard

This section can be updated using Confluence Web Panels. You can add items to the dashboard by including a web panel with the key atl.dashboard.left:

                <web-panel key="{key}" location="atl.dashboard.left">
                    <resource name="view" type="velocity" location="{location}"/>
                </web-panel>

You can remove the existing entities panel by disabling the global-entities-panel plugin from the Dashboard macros plugin.

Editing the Top Right-hand Action Bar

You can add more links to the top right navigation bar by adding web items to system.dashboard.button:

                <web-item key="{key}" name="{name}" section="system.dashboard.button">
                    <label key="{label}"/>
                    <link/>
                    <styleClass/>
                </web-item>

Modifying the Global Template or Layout

You can also modify files to add content to the global dashboard.

To make modifications to the dashboard, modify the global template /confluence/decorators/global.vmd or the layout at Administration > Layouts > Global Layout.

For example, search the Global Layout for these macros:

               $helper.renderConfluenceMacro("{recently-updated-dashboard:dashboard|showProfilePic=true}")

To modify the bundled plugin macros used in the Confluence dashboard:

  1. Modify the atlassian-bundled-plugins.zip file located at <Confluence install>/confluence/WEB-INF/classes/com/atlassian/confluence/setup.
  2. Update the confluence-dashboard-macros-x.x.jar file, rezip it and then put it back to <Confluence install>/confluence/WEB-INF/classes/com/atlassian/confluence/setup. Refer to Editing Files within JAR Archives.
  3. Delete the JAR from <confluence-home>/bundled-plugins.
  4. Restart Confluence.

To customise the space list, you can work with spacelist.vm.

Related Topics

Customising your Personal Dashboard
Customising Look and Feel Overview

11 Comments

Hide/Show Comments

  1. Jan 20, 2010

    Richard Smith

    If you are prone to gloss over instructions quickly, slow down and take a longer look at the info box. :)

    I started charging into the steps of modifying bundled dashboard macros then realized that I didn't need to do that at all for the sorts of changes I was after. I still wanted it to look like confluence, but I wanted very different dashboard content. I was able to make the dashboard changes I wanted to make by replacing part of the flobal layout with an {include} macro.

    Here's what I did.

    1. Administration >> Layouts >> Global Layout >> Create Custom
    2. I changed the #if ($mode ==  "$dashboard") section from this:

    To this: (mods are limited to the first two table cells really, the larger code section is for context).

    This has a couple of nice benefits: 

    • My main dashboard content lives in a file that I can change without having to tweak the global layout.
    • This leaves most of the ancillary bits of the dashboard, like menus, the rss feedbuilder, create a space, and so on, all intact.

    My _dashboard-content page has some standard dashboard elements like the spaces list, but the rest of the main content is customized, and easily tweakable.  

    1. Sep 01, 2010

      Kyle Albert

      My friend, you just saved me a ton of time.  Yesterday I went through all the trouble of hand editing the global.vmd file to create a highly customized dashboard page, but I was not happy that any changes I would need to make would require editing that file again instead of just updating a Confluence page.  

      Your solution is perfect.  Thank you!!

    2. Apr 28, 2011

      Anonymous

      Almost a year later and this is by far the single most useful comment I've found and used in the years we've had Confluence. This makes things so much better with redirects and all.

      Thank-you so much for sharing your solution!!! (thumbs up)

      Blessings to you.

    3. Apr 29, 2011

      Allison Young

      Hello,Richard Smith,I just want to say "thank you very much". I am a Chinese,and my english is poor.If there are mistakes,please forgive me.

      I am a new user of Confluence,just from 2011.04.18.My boss ask me add quik links at the top right of Confluence Dashboard.I try to add URLs in Administration >> Layouts >> Global Layout.But I found it fail to find the page when the page's name changed.I knew can put a page into another page(This idea comes from adding a page to the welcome message part).But I didn't know how to do this.After looked your comment ,I did it.

      Here is what I did.

      the original code:

      I added some section:

      1. Apr 29, 2011

        Allison Young

        sorry,the code executed.I can not make it.

        1. Apr 29, 2011

          Allison Young

          use "code block" to solve it.

  2. Jan 28, 2010

    Bronwyn Davies

    I need to increase the number of Favourites appearing on the Dashboard.  Is there a simple way I can increase/set ("{favpages:maxResults=$maxFavouritePages{color}}") without editing a .jar file?

    1. Feb 08, 2010

      Azwandi Mohd Aris [Atlassian]

      The simplest way that I can think of is to edit your Global Layout via Admin Console->Layouts. Find the following line:

      Increase the number to increase you favourite pages count on the dashboard. Hope that helps!

  3. Apr 05, 2010

    Anonymous

    Is there an easy way to customize the dashboard to remove the link for Create new community (or modify it)?

    Thanks in advance.

    1. Apr 05, 2010

      Anonymous

      Nevermind.  I found that there is a module called Create Dashboard Link that removes the link from the dashboard when disabled.  Thanks anyway. :)

  4. Nov 30, 2011

    Anonymous

    How to change the column widths on the dashboard. Default is like 30% left 70% right. I want to reverse that.