+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?

I agree that it would be nice to do this but I have found a nice simple workaround.

Under "Browse Space" > "Space Admin" Select "Layout" under the "look and feel section"

Once there look for the Section titled "Content Layouts" There find "Page Layout" and click the link "Create Custom" search the page for

#renderChildren()

and change that to

#renderChildren(FALSE)

This will remove the whole Children section of the page for all pages in this space.

Thanks for the comments. I agree that Builder is a good way to solve the issues I describe (although admittedly I haven't tried it... we just hacked into our templates directly). However I think that it is overkill for the simple kinds of configurations such as described in this bug report . I think there is a general problem here, so I agree with the intent of this issue.

What I was trying to suggest was that instead of providing a couple of very specific configuration options for hiding children, this request probably needs to be considered more generically. There are a number of kinds of content that are put onto the page that it would be helpful for the user to control, both globally and per space. So I was suggesting that rather than adding new admin options, instead these should be considered as configuration options for each theme. Of course, if these options end up needing to be added to each theme then maybe there should be a more centralized way of specifying them. Probably there should be both global and per theme configuration options.

I think Guy's comments were in response to Andy Armstrong's desire for a more flexible and customisable interface for making a Confluence interface more acceptable in a commercial environment where the users are not used to the default interface. All of Andy's illusion breaking areas are resolvable in Builder 2.0.

While this doesn't resolve the underlying issue of being able to change the default shown/hidden state of children (and this issue still stands to be resolved), it does meet Andy's criteria without needing a plugin to be developed.

I'm not certain that will solve the problem Guy - I had the issue of children being listed using Builder 1.6. Perhaps you've solve the issue in 2.0, but it should still be possible to turn it off for all other themes, IMHO - it's just plain annoying...

You could just use Builder 2.0 - all the standard Confluence UI features (children, on-page label editor, favourites icon, etc) have been converted in to macros so you just go in to theme config click the panel you want to edit on the layout preview and then change the wiki notation that defines the contents of that panel (or move it to another panel or replace it with different macors, etc)

This has bothered me for the whole time that I've used Confluence. It is relatively easy for a Confluence administrator to strip out the children from the main layout (that's what we've done), but for anyone else they have no control.

For example, the FAQ in the Confluence Community looks somewhat ridiculous listing all of the children immediately after the same list is shown in a more categorized format:

http://confluence.atlassian.com/display/DISC/Frequently+Asked+Question

Because I am not the administrator of the Atlassian Confluence there is nothing I can do about this.

In general, I think the Confluence defaults should be to make pages look as if they are part of an ordinary website by default. Currently the Wiki specific parts get in the way of reading the content, and treating it like a website. My feeling is that an enterprise wiki should aim to make its pages feel normal to someone who doesn't know that the site was created as a wiki. Areas in which this illusion is broken include:

• the "Dashboard" link rather than having "Home"
• the "Added by" information
• the "Labels" section
• the "Children" section
• the "View/Edit/Attachments/Info" section

The last of these is probably the one part that I would leave, because you need some way to edit the page. I wish it were more discrete, though. It is hard to fit the look of this section into an existing website design.

If it were easy to create a custom theme where these were all removed then I guess there would be less need for the proposed settings. Unfortunately custom themes are beyond the scope of most Wiki users. Maybe what is needed is a configurable theme where an administrator can control all these aspects without dropping into code.

Even just putting the whole children section in a <div id="pageChildren"> section of its own would suffice - at least then it could be hidden via CSS.

My ideal would be that it could be turned off totally via both a global and space-level option. I'm quite capable of listing the children of a page using the

macro - having them show up on my main page is just annoying...