Upgrading Custom Layouts

As Confluence evolves, so do the default layouts that drive the rendering of every page. As new functionality is added or current functionally is changed, the default layouts are modified to support these changes.

Take care on each new release of Confluence to reapply your changes to the new default templates.

To reapply your custom layouts, you need to:

1. Obtain the source of your custom layout from your current version of Confluence.
2. Reapply your customisations to the new default layouts.

Step 1. Obtaining your Custom Layouts

Before Confluence 2.3, custom layouts are stored in the velocity directory within your Confluence home directory tree. You can open these files in any text editor.

With Confluence 2.3 and later, custom layouts are stored in the DECORATOR table within your Confluence database. You can SELECT for the source of the layout using SQL like this:

mysql> select SPACEKEY,DECORATORNAME,BODY from DECORATOR;
+----------+---------------------+------+
| SPACEKEY | DECORATORNAME       | BODY |
+----------+---------------------+------+
| NULL     | decorators/main.vmd | ...  |
+----------+---------------------+------+
1 row in set (0.03 sec)

This example was tested on MySQL, but should be relevant for all SQL databases.

Step 2. Reapplying your Customisations

You will need to manually apply the changes you made to the new default layouts provided by the new version of Confluence.

Use the documentation on customising layouts to create a new custom layout and use the source obtained in step 1 to manually reintegrate them.

Turning off caching

Velocity is configured to cache templates in memory. When you edit a page from within Confluence, it knows to reload that page from disk. If you are editing the pages on disk, you will either have to turn off velocity's caching temporarily in WEB-INF/classes/velocity.properties, or restart the server to make your changes visible.

For Confluence 2.6, the velocity.properties file is available in the confluence-2.6.0.jar file. The jar file is located in the WEB-INF/lib directory. If you wish to make modification to the files in the jar, we recommend the following steps:

1. Stop Confluence.
2. Make a backup copy of the jar file.
3. Un-jar the file
4. Locate and edit the appropriate file that you wish to modify.
5. Re-jar the confluence-2.6.0.jar file.
6. Relocate the jar file to the appropriate directory.
7. Restart Confluence.