I've never really liked the Clickr theme that's bundled with Confluence, but now I know why...
When I first saw the theme my thoughts were something along the lines of "looks distinctive, but the navigation is painful" and I left it at that. I know a lot of people use it in personal spaces for a blog and then dump the blog-posts macro on the home page, which is possibly the theme's only legitimate use.
I've just been trying to explain to a customer how the Clickr theme works (in terms of how to use it as an end-user and how to find content and collaborate in spaces that use it) and now I know that I really hate it. So much so I'm writing this blog post at 3:30 AM!
First of all, the child pages aren't shown at the bottom of pages. This instantly leads to a "mystic meat" navigation scenario whereby people add pages and then can't find them again because they seemingly disappear from the on-screen navigation.
Sure, you can click the "pages" link in the grey panel at the bottom of the page to get to the alphabetical listing of pages but that doesn't quickly show you what's attached to this page. So you click the "tree view" link and you get an unexpanded tree view because it doesn't know what page you were previously looking at (the last page it saw was the alphabetical list) forcing you to wade through the tree view manually – which is kinda hard if you don't know where your page is in that tree – to find the damn thing. Rargh!
Then there's comments: They aren't displayed by default, so you have to find the "add comment" link in the grey panel at the bottom to add the first comment. It's obvious when you know what to do, but the first time people encounter the Clickr theme they struggle to work out how to add comments because there's no link in a "zero thought" location. When adding the first comment to any page you keep getting the same sense of "this sucks" because you first look in the most logical place for the link, only to find it missing and then have to look in the least intuitive place - the far bottom right for the most commonly used links! Insane!
Because the theme has almost no config options (in fact, I not sure if it has any at all!) you can't do anything about the usability issues.
A while back I made a Clickr-like layout using our Theme Builder plugin just to see how long it would take (about a day for the majority of it then another day or so over time as we made various tweaks). The benefit of Theme Builder is that if you want to display child pages at the bottom of the page it's a simple case of adding the {builder-children} macro (or even the common {children} macro if you so desire) to the footnotes or footer panel in the Layout Tab. If you want to force the comments area to be displayed even when there are no comments you simply tick the "Force comment display" option in the Options Tab.
Anyway, I digress...
The key thing I've noticed is that the Clickr theme that comes with Confluence is a barrier to collaboration because people spend most of their time working out where things are and how to add content rather than just getting stuff done.
The customer was using the Clickr theme to encourage adoption within the organisation – but it's had the complete opposite effect because it makes adding content and collaborating deeply painful.
So, a word of advice: Feel free to use Clickr theme on your personal blog but never use it in a space intended for content or collaboration because it will kill adoption of your wiki stone dead.
If you do want something that looks like the Clickr theme, consider getting our Theme Builder plugin and installing our version of it - then you can edit the navigation to make it usable in a collaborative environment.
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