Theme Builder

I'm not quite sure what you are want to achieve, but would a {pagetree2} macro work for you?

Bah, it is still having difficulty locating the current page when rendered from the perspective of a comment ... I'll look into that

Using the children macro, or indeed most other macros, it's not possible because there are no additional classes added to the HTML to indicate which is the active location and thus allow styling.

On our site, we've hard-coded the tabs and links bar items and given each link that's shown a class (eg. "zone-products" on the products tab and "section-forum" on the forum link).

Using the new flag logic feature, we've used the builder-show/hide macros to set flags depending on the current "zone" and "section" of the site, a simplified example:

{builder-show:space=Products,Builder,Bubbles,etc...}
  {set-flag:zone-products}
{builder-show}

{builder-show:flag=zone-products|title=Forum|recurse=true}
  {set-flag:section-forum}
{builder-show}

When a flag is set, a class gets added to the HTML body tag (eg. "flag-zone-products" and "flag-section-forum" in the case of this page) so we can then use some CSS to highlight the zone tab and section link:

.flag-zone-products .zone-products {
  /* css to highlight the tab goes here */
}
.flag-section-forum .section-forum {
  /* css to highlight the forum link goes here */
}

As you can imagine, the CSS gets a little bloaty however for high volume sites it's far faster for the browser to handle slightly bloaty CSS than it is for the server to handle extensively bloaty wiki markup (the old approach). There isn't really any other way to do it at present (well, there is the old bloaty wiki markup method but we avoid that due to performance issues).

One of the problems with Confluence is that it's content is extremely dynamic and there are many ways of viewing a page (eg. page info, page attachments, old versions, etc). We've not yet found a simple and performant method of dealing with this particular issue.

While the approach we've taken on our site is hard-coded (setting the flags, css, etc) it's working well so far as almost all our spaces have the same sorts of sections. For something more dynamic, you'd need to develop a java macro that outputs an unordered list of links (a bit like the output of the children macro) but somehow add a class to the links that relate to the current location in the site. Sounds easy, but the more you dig in to it the more problematic it gets - especially on high volume sites where performance is a critical factor.

As Alain mentions, the only other feasible approach is to use the pagetree2 macro, however that's not suitable for use with menus (a situation we hope to resolve in a future release of Builder).