Updated 15-07-2014 for Brikit+Theme+Press

 

Here I will try to "rate" - on a complete subjective basic - some Theme/style Plugins for Confluence 

RefinedWiki Original Theme

A fine plugin for spicing up a site or space relatively easy, with several very nice themes right out of the box, combined with a wide color range. A fair part of customizations are available for headers, footers and menus, as one of the best, this has a fixed with design, making up for the "Easy Reader Theme", lost in Confluence as of version 5

The designs are very usable, but I find the Dashboard links, breadcrumbing and links a bit confysing and also the language parts are quite poor. The theme has alternate styling for blog "dsfsdf" wich makes the blog lokking very bloglike, and very little confluence like; wich for my part is not good, as the blog looking is distancing it from the pages looking, as if I was actually using two seperate prodcuts.

The footer designer is pretty nice, but also quite limited, making the footer 90% of what You were aiming for (not nessesarily bad (smil) ). The Plugin makes it possible to create Your own designs, wich must be nice, but also quite timecomsuming. This theme also has a maximize content button (Full screen function), so the content can fill most of the browser, hidding menus and stuff, quite usefull in some cases where a page has a lot of content or needs to be viewed fullscreen (fullbrowser, anyway) 

I have not tested the Dashboard part. 

Conclusion: Very, very good if You can live with some limitations regarding design and footer. Somewhat confusing in linking. The developers documentation is very good.

 

Enterprise Theme

This is a very usable pluging with a bundle of extra usable Macros available, even if the Theme is not selected on a site, making is usefull with other themes.

The plugin has some strong blogpost macros as gu-blog-posts and top-stories

The design is rather flexible and the fact that You have a wiki markup "placeholder" - Called Global Sections -  for both headers, footer, sidebars and below contant make it easy to set ind extra macros, contents and stuff, that would be relative diffecult to put in otherewise. Also, all the content placeholders can either just inherit from the global design (in the Confluence Admin section) or be maintained per site, very very flexiple.

Global settingsAltered for a space

Red= Altered for the space

Blue=Inherits from the Global

 

The same goes for the "General confuration", also defined at the Confluence Admin level, and inherited to each space, where it can be altered for the space, breaking inheritance.

 

Also, quite som fair amount of styling is available, but customization of fontsizes are completely missing, and the fonts set by the theme are rather small, this can be fixed (partly) with the following code in the Global HTML (or style pr. space). But of cause, this is my subjective opinion

 /* Enterprise Theme font corrections */
.wiki-content h1 {font-size: 35px; }
.wiki-content h2 {font-size: 30px; }
.wiki-content h3 {font-size: 25px; }
.wiki-content h4 {font-size: 21px; }
.wiki-content h5 {font-size: 17px; }
.wiki-content p  {font-size: 15px; }
.wiki-content a, .wiki-content a:link, .wiki-content a:visited { color: #538011; text-decoration: underline; }
.wiki-content a:hover { color: #000000; }
.block-element-recently-updated .recently-updated-sidebar a {font-size: 15px; }

 

Also, the theming and the sidebars are very flexible for admin to set design, and some very special features as "Set as landing page" versure the default "Embed page View" are very nice and gives users a good inpression on hitting a page (this is customizealbe per page):

As the name Enterprise indicates, this theme is meant for business, more that public facing or "pleasure" - so there are no integrations to social medias like facebook, twitter or similar.

 

Conclusion: An excellent pluging, but the small fonts and missing Style Designer gives it some heavy limitations. The developers documentation is very poor, but the plugin is relative intuitive.

 

Zen Foundation

Definitily a strong pluing with one of the largest cusomizations possiblities, which - for my part - also makes it the one not to use, and the customizations is very timeconsuming.

Secondly, the out of the box designs are so ugly, that You feel like giving up instantly; but this is what "professionals" often use for making more public sites, when compeding agains typical CMS rivals as Joomla, Drupal etc etc

Awarded several times:

 

Used - among others, here:

Conclusion (very subjective after a short test): Problably an excellent product, but be prepared to take on a time-consuming task to design Your style(s). As a private focusing on content rather than nitty gritty design, I kind of "resigned" on the plugin.

 

Adaptavist Themebuilder

I cant say that I have tested this (very) much; my first disappointment is that out of the box, nothing is prepared, preloaded or added - the ROOT Theme is basically just a copy of the Confluence 5 Theme.

I have not read the manual or attended the Webinar (yet), but I am somewhat disappointed. Most other theme's - and especially RedifinedWiki has a some (or a lot of colors), fonts, a new footer etc, just waiting to be enabled; this is not the situation with ThemeBuilder. I would have loved 5 to 10 skins - or just a "installed with sample skins" or a "get samples here" big red button...

Oppositite to the Enterprise Theme, ThemeBulder works with "Storage Format" - aka xhtml, and as with Zen, the whole getting in business takes quite an effort; You dont just jump into the product. It's for sure a compeditor to Zen as both products are for those who want to brand their Confluence to the Max; typically for Internet faced sites.

I like the possibility to make N number of skins and the inherit part; but I am sure it gets very complicated to maintain at some point.

Conclusion (very subjective after a short test)Problably an excellent product, but as with Zen, be prepared to take on a time-consuming task to design Your style(s). As a private focusing on content rather than nitty gritty design, I kind of "resigned" on the plugin.

Brikit ThemePress

To be honest, I never got it right - spent some 1/2 hour figuring it out. A minus could be that my other Theme plugins and custom CSS fucked it up a bit (should have been tested on a clean instance) - but I never got the idea in the Layout and building block pages - and I do hate plugins that twist standard Confluence things and change their behavior - suddenly the "Edit" button did it a bit different and a new menu item on the Tools apeared: Edit entire page - Followed by a warning about this was only for certain procedues as copy page etc...

The videos seems nice and the documentation appears well at first sight, but I never got it.... 

Overall conclusion

No theme can be branded as a winner, for that the themes are way to different, and each coveres a part of what the need You may have.

Zen Foundation and Adaptavist ThemeBuilder (and perhaps Brikit Theme Press) is for sure the leading products if You want to go all the way, whereas Enterprise Theme in general is quite "portal"/Internet aming. RefinedWiki is easiest for making a quick and nice look in overall, and with a Designer for making Your own themes, something the users of Enterprise Theme may miss after a while.