Theme Builder

Hi,

I'd like to share the experiences we had with our Ordina company wiki, which has been upgraded the 11th of May (2009), to Confluence 2.10.3 and ATB 3.3.3. In particular, the menu's and its performance.

Ordina is a consulting firm in the Netherlands, hence we use the wiki for sharing knowledge and collaboration. Currently we have about 1700 users, growing to a 5000.

We started to build the new GUI with aspects from the Adaptavist (v4) in mind. A menubar, with edit and tools menu.

One thing we think is very important: all spaces should be easy accessible to users / colleagues. Users must be encouraged to visit other spaces than just their favorites.

We have about 80 spaces, divided among 11 categories. What we did was putting 6 menus on the menubar, most menus have submenus in order show the 11 categories. Nine categories are visible to everyone, spaces of 2 categories might be restricted.

Menu performance initially
The first attempt was a combination of space labels, , and the reporting plugin with the space reporter. That was repeated for each space category, 11 times. It was painfully slow initially (on the staging environment, running inside a VMWare instance). Showing a page took easily over 20 seconds.
One of the things that helped was changing the filter for space labels from space-reporting to a collection-filter combined with a text filter. That increased speed to a 4 - 8 seconds per page.

With this settings, we went live...

After tuning
It was quickly obvious that the slow part of the rendering was the menubar - by using a special 'mobile' layout on normal browsers, which didn't have a menubar at all. With that, it seemed so much faster. Thanks again for the tip for adding '?layoutId=MOBIEL&latch=true' to the URL!

With some trial and error, and still wanting to display about 80 spaces in the menu's, it turned out that

• {compound-menuitem} macro for each space (= menuitem) with custom link is fastest. Probably because it skips the permission checking part (~70 times)
• for spaces which must be restricted, we use

  {menuitem}[Menu item 1|SPACE1:Home page 1]{menuitem}
  

• The menubar is not shown when editing a page of newsitem

Other observations

• The cache macro. Potentially problemsolving! Not, it gave errors on the dashboard, maybe related to importing the menubar code from a special space/page
• We tried

  \{wikimenu}
  * [Menu item 1|SPACE1:Home]
  ...
  * [Menu item x|SPACEx:Home]
  \{wikimenu}
  

  This wasn't bad, but it turned out that the one we've chosen (above) was about a second faster.

By now, we see pages coming back in a 2 - 4 seconds. This is regarded acceptable, given the desire for 80 spaces in menus...

Regards, Herman.