Instructions - Documentation
Follow the steps below to setup a documentation site with Refined for Confluence Server and Data Center. We use our own documentation site as inspiration to walk you through the steps.
1. Theme
The theme used on our documentation site is similar to the following theme.
Download the theme and change the colours to match your brand.
Alternatively, try out this fun theme we call “Radiant Theme”.
2. Structure
The way you structure your site depends on your information heirarchy. On our documentation site, each Refined app has a Confluence space home. We use the dropdown category structure to organize the apps into the Product Category.
In this example you can see how the spaces are organized into subcategories (the green label) and then into the product category (pink label). In reality, Space 1 would be “Refined for Confluence”, space 2 Refined for Jira and so on. We are calling it Space 1 here so you understand how the spaces sit in the dropdown menu.
Create your Confluence space homes. E.g., Refined for Confluence Documentation Space Home.
Use the Site Builder to create categories and subcategories in your site (+ symbol).
Organize (drag and drop) your spaces into the respective subcategories and categories.
Disable the dashboard home on the subcategory if you wish. You can also decide to disable the category home. We disabled ours on our product category home as well as subcategory homes. Click Category settings cog → Check “Disable Category Home”.
Add a custom URL to a category 3 to convert it into an external link.
Now your site navigation should look like this:
3. Customization
Each page in Refined including site homes, category homes, space homes and pages are very easy to customize with Refined’s inbuilt layout editors. More on the inbuilt layout editors here.
Customizing the site home
For a documentation use case we typically see site homes with quick links to the product space homes (and general information pages), page links and activity feeds.
View and copy the layout below.
Customizing the space layout
Note: Customization of a space and pages works differently in our Cloud app, Refined for Confluence.
Customize the space layout and save it as a template. Refined includes a space layout editor where you can customize the side bar on a space, the space home page and save it as a template. We recommend saving your commonly used space layouts as templates to save on maintenance. Click here for more info on space layout options.
For this documentation use case, Refined comes with a default “documentation” space layout you can select when creating a space, or edit and switch to it later. You can also customize your space to suit your needs.
4. Personalization
To understand how to personalize your site and manage who can see what content go here: https://partners.refined.site/space/RFCS/246644781#4.-Personalization
Other ways to personalize a documentation site:
CQL in modules
A really clever way to personalize your content is using CQL. For example you could show a users “favourite pages” (assuming they are logged in). We have a bunch of examples at this link .
Text Variables.
Text variables are $labels in the admin layouts which automatically generate text for the end user. E.g., “Welcome to $sitename”. More on text variables here .