Customising the Confluence Dashboard

If you are a Confluence Administrator, you can customise the site dashboard, affecting the way all users will see the dashboard. Some of the actions below require Confluence Administrator permissions, whereas others require System Administrator permissions.

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

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.

Disabling the 'Popular' tab on the dashboard

In some environments, you may prefer not to display the 'Popular' tab on the dashboard. For example, if your wiki allows only a small group of people to log in and contribute content or comments, then the tab may not be relevant to you.

To prevent the tab from appearing, you can disable the relevant plugin module. You need System Administrator permissions to do this. Go to the Dashboard Macros plugin (See Configuring a Plugin), choose Manage plugin modules and disable the Popular Tab module.

On this page:

Related pages:

The information on this page does not apply to Confluence Cloud.

Advanced customisations

These configurations require knowledge of plugin development and/or the Velocity template language. See our guide to the Atlassian Plugin SDK and our introduction to Velocity.

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 > General Configuration > 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:

Modify the atlassian-bundled-plugins.zip file located at <Confluence install>/confluence/WEB-INF/classes/com/atlassian/confluence/setup.
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 How to edit files in Confluence JAR files
Delete the JAR from <confluence-home>/bundled-plugins.
Restart Confluence.

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

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