I have just finished my upgrade to Confluence 3.2. I read the upgrade notes and noticed Atlassian's warning about deprecating two of the old popular Confluence themes, left navigation, and clickr.
- NOTE: Thought I saw this fixed in a later version of Confluence, but I just checked, and 3.3.1 still has this problem.
Atlassian says:
 | Advance Notice — Clickr Theme and Left Navigation Theme will not be bundled with Confluence 3.3 Please note, the Clickr Theme and Left Navigation Theme will not be bundled with Confluence 3.3. We will not support these themes from Confluence 3.3 onwards. |
Deprecating, instead of fixing, the left nav theme is an egregious violation of backwards compatibility. Shame on you Atlassian!!!.... With Left nav theme, after upgrade to Confluence 3.2, attempting to add a page to a left nav themed space gives this error:
- Error occurred during template rendering: Invocation of method 'renderNavigation' in class com.atlassian.confluence.extra.leftnavigation.LeftNavVelocityHelper threw exception java.lang.NumberFormatException: For input string: "$page.id" at templates/leftnavigation/main.vmd[line 49, column 34]. Contact your administrator for assistance.
This error happens whether you are using "Add Page" or clicking on a link to a new page.
So the Left Navigation theme isn't just deprecated after Confluence 3.2, it is just plain broken already! Not nice Atlassian!
I spoke with Atlassian about this on behalf of a very large client who has hundreds of spaces in their Confluence, along with dozens of admins who really like Left Navigation theme. Atlassian response was that the client could pay some third party to fix the Left Navigation theme. Can you believe the arrogance of that response? Can you imagine hundreds of Atlassian's customers having to hire a consultant to fix Atlassian's mistake with Left Navigation?
I have switched a couple of my spaces to "Documentation Theme" and while it is a cool theme, it is not a simple replacement for left navigation. I use leftnav for many reasons, and for my purposes it works much better than documentation theme. Here are just some of the reasons I prefer the old Confluence Left Navigation theme:
- I don't want all the top level pages of a space displayed at the right.
- I only want to display certain pages that I choose in the left nav, and I want to choose them regardless of their parent/child position in the space
- I like to place a space specific search box in the left nav area
- I like to place a google ad in the left nav area.
- I might want to place a quick link to a page in another related space in the left nav area
- Switching to Documentation theme will force me to manually migrate the text from my Navigation pages into an admin only "Configure Theme" text box, or I could use an include, but I found that certain things break that worked fine in Left Navigation theme.
I had asked "How do I do these things with documentation theme?" There is some documentation about it here...
I have tried it, and I don't like it. The space adminsitrator is given some boxes to enter in header, footer, and left nav text. But there is no revision history for the changes. And regular users can't make changes.
I like that with the old Left Nav theme, all the customization of the left hand area goes on a real wiki page called Navigation. If someone messes up the page, there is a revision history to go back to. With Documentation theme, the navigation text can only be changed by a space admin, and there is no revision history for the extra text that might be added.
Also the {html} macro does not work properly in the "Configure theme" box for Navigation text. When I tried entering the HTML from my Navigation page into the Configure Themes "Navigation" box, the javascript displayed as right text on the left. Apparently the boxes can't handle the {html} macro.
I tried placing {include:Navigation} in the Configure Theme box for the left hand area. This will include the Navigation page, but the {html} block is still not properly displayed, it displays as raw text. I tried putting {include:Navigation} at the top of a regular page, and the google ad showed up properly, the {html} is parsed properly in that case. Whoops!
Left nav is incredible useful, and simple. It is a real shame Atlassian can't be bothered to keep this great theme working as you move forward.
Please bring back a properly working left nav theme!!!!!
Also, Atlassian seems to expect me to go through dozens of spaces, one at a time, manually changing them from left nav to "documentation theme"? Apparently I have no other choice, or I face not being able to add any pages to any of my left nav spaces if I don't change.
Sorry Atlassian, I've spoke with you several times about this, and everyone at Atlassian sticks to the party line that it is too expensive for Atlassian to maintain these old popular themes. BTW, gentle reader, in case you didn't notice, Atlassian is deprecating two of the three original themes that have shipped with Confluence until now. Time to share this bad decision with the world.
Also the new "Documentation Theme" has a problem when editing in wiki markup mode: With IE 8, the first line of the edit box is hidden underneath the icon bar at the top of the edit box, so you can't see the first line! At least that is not broke in the deprecated left navigation theme.
See an example of how left navigation is a very useful theme:
http://www.bobsgear.com/x/GYDr
BTW Atlassian, I speak from experience. I know how expensive maintaining backward compatibility can be.
I worked at Borland International for 5 years in the Quality Assurance department. My job was to make sure the Turbo Assembler stayed backward compatible with itself, and also Microsoft Assembler, while each new version continued to include new features and advancements. In that kind of situation, there is no way to have a hope of a product if you break people's old source code, or expect them to go through all their old source code to make changes because you can't be bothered to protect the investment they've made in using past copies of your product. If we messed up in those areas, we would quickly lose our customers. Microsoft often changed things in their revisions of Macro Assembler, breaking old code. But in Turbo Assembler, we actually had various mode statements so that we could preserve compatibility with older code written for various versions of Macro Assembler. Imagine how large my test suite was to make sure we didn't break anything with all those various modes! My our customers sure thanked us for that investment in not deprecating (i.e. breaking) their legacy code.
Related pages:
- Bug report about left nav problem, which is recently fixed by a new left nav plugin - http://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-19142