• Article
  • Sep.16.2015

Confluence configuration : 6 tips and tricks for administrators

  • Sep.16.2015
  • Reading time mins

Implementing and integrating the Atlassian suite day in day out for our clients, I come across a lot of questions around Confluence customisation and configuration by in-house admins. This blog is a a bit of a tips and tricks session for Confluence : a compilation of the most commonly asked questions, and their answers. I hope this will help you shape your Confluence the way you want it.

Let the tips and tricks session begin…

Remove Atlassian Logo

Starting with the footer of Confluence. Many of you have always wanted to remove the Atlassian logo from the footer. Now – this is not easily done by editing the system files.

I however have a quick solution to this, and that involves customizing the HTML. Nothing to worry, you will not be changing any system files with this one. To do this, you would have to go to Administration > Custom HTML section. Over here, you will have to click on “Edit” and add the following code to “At end of the BODY” section.

<style>
footer#footer { background: transparent; }
#footer-logo { display: none; }
</style>

And there you go, Atlassian logo removed.

Add Company Logo

This brings us to the next most commonly asked question. How to add Company logo to footer? Well, don’t go anywhere, stay on the same page i.e. Custom HTML and add the following code to “At end of the BODY” section.

<style>
#footer .footer-body, #footer-logo a, #footer-logo a:hover {
background: url("https://url-to-image-file.png") no-repeatscrollcenterbottom/ 114px24pxrgba(0, 0, 0, 0);
}
</style>

NOTE: I have used a URL to get the image from the Internet. However, you can use system files, but you will need to add that logo to the system files first and change the URL in the code to look for that image. Please see below

 <style>
#footer .footer-body, #footer-logo a, #footer-logo a:hover {
background: url("../path/to/png/file.png") no-repeatscrollcenterbottom/ 114px24pxrgba(0, 0, 0, 0);
}
</style>

Et Voila! You can change the size of the logo by playing with the “px” values depending on the shape of your logo.

Disable link to Atlassian page with logo

One thing that the above codes will not do is remove the link to Atlassian page. You can disable this link by adding new lines to the code as follows:

 <style>
#footer .footer-body, #footer-logo a, #footer-logo a:hover {
    background: url("https://url-to-image-file.png") no-repeatscrollcenterbottom/ 114px24pxrgba(0, 0, 0, 0);
    pointer-events: none;
    cursor: default;
}
</style>

Pointer events that triggers the link will be disabled. You can change the link itself from from system files if you would like it to point to your company homepage.

Show JIRA tickets to non JIRA users

Confluence is used for quite a lot of things, most of the time as Knowledge Base to display JIRA tickets within Confluence. You can achieve this by using JIRA Issue Macro.

However with JIRA Service Desk, customers don’t have JIRA access, therefore customers cannot see anything apart from their own requests (and only in the Customer Portal).

Usually when a customer raises an incident, internally there are RFC’s, bugs etc raised. This is hidden from the customers as they do not have JIRA access. You can find yourself in the situation where they would like to see them or  maybe they would like to see all the tickets raised by their colleagues, but they can’t.

How can this be achieved?

It is quite simple, all you have to do is create a “Basic Access” application link between the applications, and the user that is authenticated in the Basic link should be the one who has access to all the data in JIRA. Each time a customer lands on that Confluence page, it will act as the authenticated user and display the tickets to customers.

Disable link going back to JIRA in JIRA issue macro

JIRA issue macro adds a default link to Summary field that points back to JIRA. Since the customers don’t have access to JIRA, it becomes pointless for them to click on that link as they would be redirected to JIRA, rather than customer portal.

How do you tackle this? Well, you can disable link in JIRA issue macro. Don’t worry, this doesn’t involve you unpacking any .jar files. It’s a simple HTML macro. Please see below:

image2015-7-3 9_14_30

From Confluence to JIRA Service Desk’s customer portal

After reading the above, you probably have thought:  “well since JIRA issue macro redirects to JIRA, how it is possible to redirect it to JIRA Service Desk’s customer portal?”

It’s not every complex actually, you have to kind of cheat with the customers and create a duplicate “Summary” field. Yes, I know it’s a bit confusing. Let me explain.

Create a Scripted Field in JIRA, name it “Summary Link”. This field will have a script that will basically copy the summary of the issue. “Why do I have to do that?” you may ask.

Well the reason is so that we link this Summary field to the portal depending on the project that is comes from. Have a look at the code below.


import com.atlassian.jira.config.properties.APKeys
import com.atlassian.jira.ManagerFactory
import com.atlassian.jira.issue.Issue

def baseUrl = ManagerFactory.getApplicationProperties().getString(APKeys.JIRA_BASEURL)
def summary = issue.getSummary()
def pkey = issue.getProject().key
Issue issue = issue
def id=issue.getKey()

 if (pkey == "TEST"){
String url = "<a href=$baseUrl/servicedesk/customer/portal/1/$id>$summary</a>"
return url 
}else if(pkey == "TEST2"){
String url = "<a href=$baseUrl/servicedesk/customer/portal/2/$id>$summary</a>"
return url 
}

Since each project has its own portal, we can add that portal ID to the code and use that field in the JIRA issue macro instead of the actual “Summary” field

Conclusion

There we go, I hope these Confluence tips and tricks that I learnt will help you with your Confluence configuration.

Any other questions you’d like me to answer? Add a comment below! 🙂

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