Utterly sick of behaviour like this. Stick with what you recommend.

Why does Atlassian not listen to the customers who frequently stated that they want to stay with the Documentation theme?

For us this is a show stopper for any upgrade to 6.x.

When I setup our KB, it said to use the Documentation theme?  What happens to these spaces?  Do they need to be changed?

The easiest way is to disable it via space tools - configure sidebar and add the pagetree via space tools - look and feel - sidebar, header and footer. Just add {pagetree:sort=natural} to the Sidebar-Section, the Pagetree is shown without  the text an is customisable, too (like here sorted and so on, for other options look  at https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/page-tree-macro-163414255.html

 If you are using Confluence server (not the Cloud version), then you can add the following CSS to Confluence Admin > Custom HTML:

<style type="text/css">h5.page-tree {display:none;}</style>

Here is some additional reading.

Did anyone find a way to remove the text "PAGE TREE" from the sidebar? For people who're not Confluence experts this makes no sense at all, so I'd like to change it to something more helpful. Any ideas?

To find out which spaces are currently using the Documentation theme, you can run the following SQL:

SELECT bandanacontext FROM BANDANA WHERE bandanavalue LIKE '%com.atlassian.confluence.plugins.doctheme:documentation%';

For all the folks who want the space-restricted search scope in the default theme... maybe it will help to vote for this issue: CONF-5338

Rachel, thanks, maybe that was my misunderstanding though.

Thanks mjmdavidson! Glad to hear the default theme is working out for you.

For Confluence Server the theme will definitely not be removed until Confluence 6.0. I'll update the note in this issue to make sure it's a bit clearer.

We've just upgraded to 5.9.9 (Server) (hoorah!) and I've found the Doc theme is still available. I thought this was going to be removed from 5.9.

I have to say, while I was not happy with the enforced change, we've stopped using the Doc theme a few months ago and haven't missed it. If you twisted my arm, I'd have to say the default theme is actually pretty good and I have no issues using it. Everything seems to be customisable, so I'm not worried about how anything looks or works as it seems possible to change it. As for the search, I've always made it a habit to add the Page Tree Search macro to a page that has more than one sub-page. I also encourage our users to do this. So far this has been all we need to do on that front. Cheers.

Hi Helen, If you're using Confluence Cloud the doc theme will be removed over the next week. If you're using Confluence Server it will be removed in Confluence 6.0. This means that any future Confluence 5.x versions we release will still have the doc theme available.

This has probably been answered, but when you say the Documentation theme is being removed in Confluence 6, does that mean that if you retain 5.x for a time you will still have access to Documentation theme? Or does it go from all versions? thanks

Hi Thomas,

Thanks for the tip on how to limit search results to the current space, using the livesearch macro. Unfortunately, it looks like we've struck out on this topic for now. I just read the following on https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/switch-to-the-default-theme-790795554.html,

I wish the Confluence folks would give a reason why they don't want to port the already existing "Limit search results to the current space" functionality over to the default theme. I'd imagine that most groups would want to have current space search results as the default, and not the "search everything from everywhere" one. Instead of forcing everyone to use the "search everything from everywhere" option, why not let the space admins decide (like they currently can with the Documentation theme)? This seems like a great way to make many more people happy (i.e. support both options and let space admins decide on a space by space basis).

In any case, I'm glad that there still is an option to limit searches to a particular space. It'll still be tiring to answer the questions of "Why are there two search boxes on every page?" and "Why am I receiving search results from other wiki spaces?", but at least there is still a way to limit searches (for now, at least). Here's hoping that more people will express their dissatisfaction with the "search everything from everywhere" default, which leads to the Confluence folks bringing the "Limit search results to the current space" option back.

To be fair: You still can limit search results to the current space with the new default theme, either globally or per space. To achieve this, go to Space Tools (or, globally, to the Confluence Administration) > Look and Feel > Sidebar, Header and Footer.
Then add this to the sidebar:

It has some disadvantage, though: The resulting Livesearch field is constantly grabbing keyboard focus. So if you tend to use the keyboard for navigation, this will bug you (like it did to me, to the point I eventually removed he livesearch macro).

I agree this feature should be standard again, implemented in a nice way that avoids the drawback I mentioned above.

We have extensive pages that we need to be able to search in order to find process/procedures related to the work our team does. We've built up these pages over many years and it is critical to be able to completely search these pages, so the searching may be limited in the future is alarming to say the least. Unfortunately, the wiki page platform provided to our team is dictated at a corporate level, so we have no choice but to migrate and use. Therefore, I hope Atlassian will reconsider this.

along those lines of the previous comment I wanted to say my org has 89 confluence spaces, though I suspect a lot of those are not used for wiki (more for JIRA), probably at least 15 used for wiki though.

+1 to Antigone K's and Kevin Hughes' comments. If there's only one wiki space in your entire Confluence installation, then space limited search doesn't matter. However, I'd venture to say that most companies and/or groups and/or customers have more than one wiki space, making limited search really useful. To just take away this feature without getting feedback from the users/customers first, and without providing a viable and feasible workaround, is very disappointing. Below are some more detailed comments on why I think it is a mistake for Confluence to get rid of the limited search feature as part of the "default theme".

Being able to limit search results to the current space is, in my opinion, one of the most important and valuable searching options available to users in groups that have more than one wiki space, and is the main reason that our group is still using the Documentation theme for our wiki space (even with the broken Table of Contents bug (https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-39958)). Since our team has so much internal documentation, we asked for a separate wiki space to make searching quick and efficient. Forcing the search to "All Content, Everywhere" will make it nearly impossible to find relevant content, since results from all the different wiki spaces will be displayed. For example, an engineer searching for technical information on a particular product will receive search results from the product marketing, sales, and support team wiki spaces as well, and is at the mercy of the search algorithm on which results are displayed first.

From a performance perspective (i.e. user experience for searches, and IT Confluence wiki administrators concerns for load), wouldn't it make sense to natively support the "Limit search results to the current space" feature? Searching "everything from everywhere" tends to be a very expensive operation, and is going to be slower than a more specific/limited search. Multiply this by tens, hundreds or thousands of users, and you have a big strain on your resources.

One big question I have is "Why can't the "Limit search results returned by the top right search field to the current space." checkbox functionality be ported from the Documentation theme over to the Default theme's configuration options?". This functionality has already been written and tested and works great. A simple checkbox makes it easy for a wiki space admin to toggle how the default search box (available from any wiki page) work for their wiki space. The suggested workaround of using the Livesearch Macro is not very scalable (since it's per page), and really hurts the usability of search, since you have to go to the homepage (or wherever you stuck the macro) every single time you want to do a limited search (instead of the default search box being available from any page). The ability to limit search results to a specific wiki space in the Livesearch Macro proves the importance of the space limited search feature, and shows why it should be ported over as part of the default search box and Default theme.

I hope that the Atlassian Confluence team will take these points into consideration, will see the importance of the "space limited search" feature, and will port over the "space limited search" functionality as an available configuration option for the default theme and the default search box. If the team still decides to drop support for the "space limited search" feature, then I hope that they will provide reasons to their customers for dropping the feature, as well as provide a more viable workaround than adding the Livesearch Macro to every single wiki page.

wow. this is _*exactly *_the conclusion I have been coming to over the past few months.

When we adopted Atlassian it was the "enterprise Wiki" with great support. This positioning enabled me to sell it internally as our documentation platform. Recently support has been going down hill from my perspective and changes are just delivered regardless of the impact - not my understanding of "enterprise".

Yeah, Kevin. We can still do that but now it's a macro IN the page meaning it's no longer in a standardized place site wide and users (as well as page authors) will have a bit of a learning curve. This along with several other decisions and unaddressed bugs makes it quite clear that Atlassian is not interested in the enterprise market, imo.

having, at last, started to look at the default theme I am worried that the limited search facility will disappear - our authors use this all the time to help navigate within a space. If it we don't have it then its a real draw back

Hi everyone,
We have decided to delay the documentation theme migration in Confluence Cloud for a few weeks. We're also working on resolving CONF-40716 which has been affecting a number of you.
Thanks for your patience during this process.

Indeed, the "Restrict Search to current space"-Feature is a must have, as mentioned here
https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-38256?focusedCommentId=877285&page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel#comment-877285

Currently we use a custom sidebar (one page is included at top in the sidebar).
And in this custom sidebar we use the livesearch-macro, limited to the current space.

Hopefully at least this will be possible in the future, too!

The main reason for using the Documentation theme is the ability to limit search results to the current space. This is one of the features which will not be supported by the future release. Can you please reconsider this decision?

Since Confluence is used by business and IT departments there are a large number of commonly used terms in pagename's. At this moment the search is in many cases restriced to a particular space. If the search (at the top) can no longer be restricted to a certain space it introduces a major risk of using information from a different space or introducing complexity to searching (at the moment all users use the search field at the top). In our particular case this could mean that a search on how to switch high voltage assets will lead to the wrong page (in another space) with unacceptable consequences.

Hi Rosario, no problem... I completely agree that this is not acceptable. I have spent A LOT of time fixing this and still a really bad bug exists—which I've been told won't be fixed in time for the deletion of the documentation theme... It's time that I really couldn't afford to spend on something that was working perfectly well in the original theme...

Hi Helen, thanks for the hint, but I already invested too much time trying to revers engineer the HTML behind a page to figure out which element of which class I shall apply my CSS to... @Rachel: having to do this is not what I expect after paying the fee of a product!

Hi Rosario, I'm not a CSS/HTML expert either. Thankfully Bob Swift (https://bobswift.atlassian.net/wiki/) has kindly made his CSS available and I've used that as a basis for my own... There's quite a lot involved in setting it all up—I might put together some instructions for doing this, but in the meantime, the essential lines of CSS are:
max-width: 250px !important;
white-space: normal;
You have to override the style that the links use... The max-width setting sets how much horizontal space you want the links to take up, and the "white-space: normal" overrides the "white-space: nowrap" that the Confluence styles seem to set.
I hope that helps a little... If not, I'll see if I can get some instructions together sooner rather than later!

@Rachel Robins, any hint on how to do this? So far I did not manage. I am not a CSS / HTML expert! and the whole idea behind buying (250 users) server license was that non technical users could do it...

namsden, some changes, such as hiding sections of the sidebar, or switching between Page Tree or Child Page navigation can only be made on a space by space basis (so the changes you make in one space won't affect another).

If you're adding custom content to the sidebar (or a header or footer), this depends on where you make the changes. If you go to Space Tools > Look and Feel > Sidebar, header and footer - the changes you make will only apply to the current space. If you add custom content via Global Configuration > Sidebar, header and footer it will appear in all sidebars that do not already have any custom content added at the space level. I'll update the FAQ to make this a bit clearer.

rosario.dedomenico, sorry I missed your question in the FAQ. The page tree does not wrap in the sidebar. You may be able to use CSS as Helen suggests to override this behaviour.

Can someone confirm that making the manual changes to the default theme will only affect the current space. I do not want to make global changes to the theme for all users in all spaces(we have probably 2 dozen spaces). I just care about my team's space.

@Helen Griffith, could you share your CSS for wrapping the page tree?

That's great to see that you can hide the page tree from the side bar. What if you want to hide all the other stuff but keep the page tree? Luckily I have managed this with CSS* and I've got my sidebar looking almost how it was before the change... There's one outstanding bug—once that's fixed it will be like this whole default theme thing never happened... (I wonder how many people's solution is to eliminate all the 'great features' that have appeared!)
*including fixing the page tree wrapping issue

In the FAQ there is no answer to my question about wrapping the page tree text... (January 27th)

Hi christoph.meier1, sorry it has taken so long to get back to you about the spacejump macro. I've confirmed that the macro is being removed along with the documentation theme and a replacement will not be available in Confluence Cloud. I've passed your feedback on to the team about making the source available.

Well said Nate.

I opened a support case on this issue, so count my team and myself in on people not happy about retiring of this very useful theme for us. It's one of the constant reminders to me of the many downsides of using a SaaS service is often times having changes forced upon you with no ability to stop them or delay them(what we have now works, stop "fixing" it). I would love to move confluence in house though convincing others to do it has been frustrating over the years. Confluence has been my favorite wiki for about 10 years now though in recent years it seems to have been going down hill (sort of like firefox though firefox is going down 10x faster). Confluence v4 was my favorite version of the product(back when there was real wiki markup). It did everything I needed, and I have written more in confluence than anyone else in my company by FAR.

On top of that support informs me the SaaS offering has no support for 3rd party themes apparently, so there is no alternative but to use the default theme, which was terrible last I saw it.

One thing that would make the default theme more usable is an option to eliminate that sidebar altogether.

But more generally I go back to, it's working now, stop breaking it, we are very busy people and one of the last things we need is our documentation site being messed with for no good reason.

@Rachel Robins

Any updates or news concerning a replacement for the space-jump macro?
(see my comment on 19/Jan/2016 6:15 PM)

thnx in advance!

I would like text wrapping too... I am SO unhappy about this change—I HATE the look of my Confluence spaces. One thing that might make me remotely happier is if the text actually fits in the navigation pane. Without this, the site is not only horrible to look at but it's removing actual functionality.

I started testing the default theme to check how this would affect our installation, so far so good but how can I customize the sidebar page tree so that the text wraps instead of having the scrollbar at the bottom?
Please, consider that the editing the "Site Layout" is not an option given that these changes requires too much technical knowledge and need to be reapplied at each upgrade while a CSS change would do because done once and for all.

Hi Rachel,

Many thanks for your reply, it was great to come in and find the answers to my problems.

It's odd. The include macro definitely wasn't working for me last week, but is today. We had a few teething troubles with our test instance, so perhaps this is just another one of them. Thank you for encouraging me to go and look again.

Thanks also for the reassurance that the sidebar, header and footer could be set globally - somehow I'd overlooked the option in the Admin console (there are a lot of options). Both of these have moved me a long way forwards. Please correct me if I've missed any other options, but it looks as if we'd need to go and turn off the "Blog" and "Pages" link on every space - I can't see anywhere to set a default for this globally.

It would also be good to be able to turn off the PAGETREE and CHILD areas of the sidebar entirely at a global level. Apart from the fact that, we want to show a Page tree above the custom sidebar content, we'd never want it to display with hard-coded heading of "PAGETREE". This title isn't helpful to casual users who have no idea what this means - we normally use the title "In this space:" for the Pagetree macro.

For us, the sidebar should have:

• Space name
• User-configurable pagetree
• Links to other relevant spaces or external links, with the ability to group them into collapsible categories

Hi fchapman42,

The include macro should work just fine in the sidebar, header or footer. If it is not working in your instance, could you please raise a ticket with our support team so they can investigate? They'll be able to raise a bug, if necessary, so we can get the problem sorted out.

To answer your other questions, yes can add content to the sidebar, header and footer globally (for all spaces using the default theme). In the administration console head to Sidebar, header and footer. It works just the same as it does in an individual space.

Is it possible to configure the Space sidebar at the global level? I can't seem to find a way to do this.

I've just been testing the default theme in 5.9.4 as a potential replacement for our use of the documentation theme.

We make heavy use of the include and expand macros in our sidebars - it makes it really easy to display collapsible links to other versions of the documentation. It's great to see that the expand macro works, but the include macro doesn't seem to be supported. We also use the include macro throughout the site for headers and footers. This enables a technical writer to update the copyright date in the footer without needing to have admin access.

Is there any plan to add support for the include macro before you remove the documentation theme in Confluence 6.0?

I had hoped to migrate to the default theme now, ahead of the release of Confluence 6.0 but this is a blocker for us.

I also wonder whether there will be a replacement for the space-jump macro.
Do you have already more info? We could implement our own custom macro doing the same ... but only if required. This said - at some point we'd like to know whether we can expect a replacement in time or not.

If you will not provide a replacement - some source code of the 'old' solution would also be helpful.

You can query the database directly to find out which sites are using what theme. The example below will bring back all sites that are using the documentation theme

select SPACENAME, SPACEKEY, BANDANAKEY, BANDANAVALUE from SPACES s
left join BANDANA b  on (b.BANDANACONTEXT = s.SPACEKEY )
AND b.BANDANAKEY = 'atlassian.confluence.theme.settings'
WHERE BANDANAVALUE like '%documentation%';

Yes, this does. Thank you.

fchapman42, unfortunately no, we don't have any reference documentation for all the classes used in either the documentation or default theme. Many of the classes will be the same, but there will be some that differ.

kmullen, this can be a bit tricky, due to the way Confluence handles the Global look and feel.

One clue is that the Documentation theme puts a 'Browse' menu in the header. If you have Space Tools at the bottom of the footer - you're already using the default theme.

If you're a space admin you can check the Themes page. If a theme is set for that specific space, the name of the theme should be listed. If you just see 'Global Look and Feel' the space is inheriting the Theme that is set globally by a Confluence Administrator. Generally if the Documentation theme is set as the Global theme, you won't see an option to choose the Documentation theme in the Themes page for a space.

Hope this helps.

How can you tell which theme was used for a space? I know some of ours do but not all. We have been using it for quite some time. When I look at the info for a particular space, I don't see a specific theme names. Not even dafault. (n Space Tools under Look and Feel)

@Christoph,
yes, but that's also the case with the "search in this space" box in the old documentation theme.
It's my impression that our users seldom used that search box. Personally, I'm quite happy with the new, refined search filters (in Confluence 5.9).
I do not miss the documentation theme. I thought I did, but I don't.

@Thomas: Thanks for your reply!
Tried this already. From my point of view there is a second disadvantage: It results in having two search boxes on the screen. The default searchbox in the upper right and the "custom" searchbox. In terms of usability one searchbox which "does the right thing" (=search within the current space) is preferable.