since Atlassian disannounced the documentation theme, it might be interesting for some +1er (do you know the vote button?) what is the current state:

• old installations needs to be patched - that's a pity
  • I personally won't recommend you to do webproxy hacks unless you're shure what you do, since this might have several sidekicks if not working correct.
• newer installations (seems to since 5.4) using the new integration theme aren't affected as this is typically disable per default! still this piece of code is entitled in the page template but conditionally off.
  According the condition I have the same question as it has been opened over there: https://answers.atlassian.com/questions/290109
  • might be, that there were intermediate versions, where children are active by default, then have a look at what Kacey said you are allowed to edit the velocity templates at the admin interface: /admin/listdecorators.action (in standalone installations!)
• cloud-users are not allowed to change templates, but integration theme has no more children displaying in content as it is for current standalone installation. As said in the intro: atlassian will not continue this theme, you should head over to the integration theme and if there is anything missing: bother support, open request tickets, make noice ... now

I don't think that this "option" will come anyway if it is not already implemented but unknown: refer to point 2 above
Even Bugfixes are mostly done in the latest release branch but not in any older. That's how atlassian release plan and support works. Working to far from the head will bite you in the a*** as it will be massivly time consuming and frustrating updating confluence each month.

+1 for hiding children option

I set up Confluence OnDemand for some new users for evaluation. The first thing that disconcerted them was the ugly 'Child Pages' link at the bottom of each page. Not being able to remove it has been an unexpectedly significant issue.

interesting enought: #children-section is only visible for documentation theme users. It has been removed from the new successing integrated default theme. So for those who liked it (I doubt that aren't that much) it is now unavailable

+1 for option in ondemand

I agree with Thomas Nilsson. I would like to turn off the 'Child Page' at the bottom of the page in Confluence OnDemand. It's superfluous and confusion for our non-english speaking users.

When using the OnDemand-solution, it is quite frustrating that you cannot modify the L&F according to your liking. However, this is an acceptable tradeoff, if you are able to at least have control over the different sections in the page you are viewing. We are using the Documentation layout and since the tree-layout on the left hand side makes it easier for you to navigate, The 'Child Page'-section is just confusing and a waste of space. It is incredible that this has been going on since 2006 and not yet resolved...

Workaround:

For the issue of confused new users and the "show child pages" feature being the initial choice rather than "hide child pages", the problem with the initial value is that it is set so deep within confluence that even 3rd party support is scared of the problem.

The long term solution is totally customized themes with ThemeBuilder if we could make time for that...

Outside-the-box workaround that will require administrative support:

1) send new users to a Welcome page (this could be value-added page with some explanation.) This could be a Welcome page within a space or just a global Welcome page. The point is it should be named "Welcome".

2) a special proxypass within front-end apache traps this request and appends showChildren=true to the parameters, effectively setting the initial value.

You just have to welcome a batch of newbies with the Welcome page instead of the general URL to wiki.

This needs to be placed within virtual host config rather than in whatever global space is outside the virtual host:

# special wiki passthru
#outside-the-box show children scheme
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^/wiki/display/(.*)Welcome$ http://somehost.org:8080/wiki/display/$1Welcome?showChildren=true [P]
ProxyPass /wiki http://somehost.org:8080/wiki
ProxyPassReverse /wiki http://somehost.org:8080/wiki

Having children hidden by default is kinda dumb, there really needs to be an option to turn it on globally, or an option which doesn't require to you rebuild confluence from the source!

We actually like having Show Children as the default since it is simpler for new users. However, we understand and would support a simple option to change the default to hide children at the global and space-wide.

What would really be helpful to us would be the ability to hide children (or the entire children section) on a page-by-page basis - e.g. as part of the

macro or as a stand-alone macro. Has anyone figured out a simple way to do that?