 | If you're looking for the Confluence Dashboards Plugin, please go to the Confluence Dashboards Plugin page here |
 | NB: This method of replacing the dashboard has been superceeded by the Dashboard Tab in Builder 3.x |
This tutorial shows you how to create completely customised dashboards...
Preface
We have been getting lots of requests asking how we made our heavily customised Dashboard= on this website. This tutorial covers the basic concept of creating a custom dashboard and we'll add more tutorials showing how to furter customise it over time.
To create a custom dashboard, we will redirect requests from The Dashboard to a specific Space, thus allowing full customisation of the new "dashboard space" that's presented to users.
Requirements
You will need to be logged in as a System Administrator and must have the following plugins installed:
- Redirection Plugin - in particular, the redirect macro
In addition, we strongly recommend installing the following plugins as they will give you far more control over personalisation and customisation of your custom dashboard:
- Visibility Plugin - in particular, the show-to macro and hide-from macro for personalisation
- Composition Plugin - in particular, the deck macro, card macro, cloak macro and toggle-cloak macro for improved layout
- Content Formatting Macros - numerous macros that allow you to make content look nicer, including the infamous lozenge macro
Other plugins that might be of interest, depending on what features you want on your dashboard, include:
- Page Tree Plugin - an interactive site map can be added with the pagetree macro
- Linking Plugin - links to common locations, such as the user profile, can be added using the link-to macro
Step 1 - Create a Custom Dashboard Space
Create a new space to hold your new dashboard. You can call it anything you want, but we recommend using "Dashboard" as the space key so that URLs will be like:
Step 2 - Build the new Dashboard
The home page of the space you have just created will be your new dashboard. Edit the page to include the following:
{section}{column:width=50%}
Insert your introduction text here
{spaces}
{column}{column:width=50%}
{recently-updated:width=100%|types=page,news,comment|spaces=*}
{favpages}
{column}{section}
You'll now have something that looks similar to the default dashboard:
|
Insert your introduction text here
|
Recently Updated
Favourite Pages
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Obviously, you'll probably want to change this design – we've only used it in this example so that you can see the key macros that have been used on the original dashboard:
- spaces macro - displays a tabbed list of spaces
- recently-updated macro - displays a list of recently updated content
- favpages macro - displays the favourite pages for the logged in user
Step 3 - Redirecting to the new Dashboard
Now, it's no use having a new dashboard if everyone keeps going to the old dashboard. To get round this problem, we use the redirect macro.
Go in to General Configuration and in the Site Welcome Message setting, add in the following:
{redirect:Dashboard:Home}
This will redirect all requests to your original dashboard to the new dashboard.
Related Tutorials
We're bound to get plenty of questions on this tutorial and will be creating more tutorials showing additional tricks here...
If you have a question on customised dashboards, please ${renderedContent}.
Frequently Asked Questions
| Q | Why doesn't the recently-updated macro reflect the spaces shown by the spaces macro? |
|---|---|
| A | Sadly, this only works on the original dashboard. At present, it's not possible to filter the list of recently updated content to the spaces shown in the selected tab of the spaces macro. |
Comments (7)
Jun 27, 2006
Anonymous says:
In Confluence 2.2.2, you can also specify a "Site Homepage" in the general confi...In Confluence 2.2.2, you can also specify a "Site Homepage" in the general config.
You need to change this to your new page - it seems the first time a user logs in, this is the page they will see regardless of the redirect.
Jun 30, 2006
Anonymous says:
"Dashboard" is spelled incorrectly as seen here: To create a custom dashboard, ..."Dashboard" is spelled incorrectly as seen here:
To create a custom dashboard, we will redirect requests from The Dashboard to a specific Space, thus allowing full customisation of the new "dashbaord space" that's presented to users. Nice tutorial though, very useful--thanks!
Ben H.
Nov 09, 2006
Anonymous says:
I would like to maintain the links at the bottom of the left column of the defau...I would like to maintain the links at the bottom of the left column of the default dashboard to the customized dashboard space: creat a space and feed builder for those user have contain rights only. how could I do it.
Nov 09, 2006
Guy Fraser says:
If you're using Builder 2.0 or above you can use the menulink macro. Alternative...If you're using Builder 2.0 or above you can use the menulink macro. Alternatively you can use the [create-space macro] (can't remember the exact notation and I don't think we have it documented here) and the link-to macro to generate the various links.
Feb 22, 2008
Alain Moran says:
This page needs updating for 3.0This page needs updating for 3.0
Oct 23, 2008
Leon Collins says:
I'm trying to customize my dashboard based on the logged in user and the above e...I'm trying to customize my dashboard based on the logged in user and the above example is very useful but i would like to filter the list of spaces return by the space macro even more. What I would really like to be able to do is list all the spaces the user/user group has access to except the the spaces that the confluence-users group has access to. It would be easy if I could just take the user(s) out of the confluence-users group but then that would pose another problem when they try to log into Confluence. In our Confluence installation we have a bunch of spaces we want to give all our users access to so we add the confluence-users group to those spaces but we have several groups of other users we don't want dashboard clutter with those spaces that every in the confluence-users group have access to.
Thanks,
Leon
Oct 23, 2008
Guy Fraser says:
We're currently brewing an open source plugin that will allow this sort of thing...We're currently brewing an open source plugin that will allow this sort of thing - Advanced Search version 2. It's going to be under development for at least few more months so if you want to do this sort of thing in the interim you'd probably need a bespoke plugin or it might be possible to use David Peterson's "Reporting Plugin" (available via the plugin repository).