What Atlassian use to brand their own Confluence and Service Desk instances?
Asked by Ori Shalom:

Hi,

The new Atlassian brand looks really good.  
I would like to know what you are using to brand your Confluence and Service Desk instances to look like this.

Is it a plugin? simple customized CSS? customizing templates? building a new UI on top of the existing REST API?  

Knowing what you are using will help me to choose the right direction for branding our own Confluence and Service Desk servers.

Also if this design would have been the default design of a new Confluence and the Service Desk instillation that would have been really nice as they look much more appealing than what currently provided.

Thanks,  
Ori


Answers:
author: Brant Schroeder
body: Atlassian uses a custom UI that uses their REST API. There is a company Refined Wiki, <http://www.refinedwiki.com/>, that allows you to customize confluence and the service desk portals easily and might be worth looking into their plugin.

comments: author: Ori Shalom
body: Thanks,

Building custom UI that uses the REST API sounds like to much work.

I manage to brand the Service Desk pretty nicely with CSS but the real challenge is the Confluence.

I'll try to make it work with custom CSS or with the plugin you suggested for now.

I wish that in future versions Atlassian products will come with a more modern look and feel by default.


author: Nils Bier _K15t_
body: Hi Ori,

To display their help content on [confluence.atlassian.com](https://confluence.atlassian.com) and all the other doc pages, Atlassian uses [Scroll Viewport.](https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.k15t.scroll.scroll-viewport/server/overview)

Scroll Viewport allows you to define a theme and display your Confluence content in your own companies style - the main difference to all the theming apps Nic already mentioned above is, that the Confluence editor itself is not touched, but is still displayed in the standard look and feel. Instead of theming the Confluence UI, Scroll Viewport adds an additional representation layer on top of Confluence and gives you full flexibility on the styling itselt.

You can find further examples of help centers based on Confluence and Scroll Viewport here:

* [docops.ca.com](https://docops.ca.com/home)
* [docs.bmc.com](https://docs.bmc.com/docs/remforce201601/en/home-614640746.html)
* [help.k15t.com](https://help.k15t.com/)

If you want to learn more about Scroll Viewport, please feel free to check out our [Scroll Viewport Crash Course Video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXtR8GbnaCM) on YouTube, or get in touch with us via [support@k15t.com](mailto:support@k15t.com), so we can schedule a demo and discuss your use case if wanted.

Cheers,  
Nils


author: Ori Shalom
body: Thanks for the help, I ended up customizing CSS to get to the result I wanted and I'm petty much happy about it.


author: Nic Brough -Adaptavist-
body: Confluence supports "themes", you can add these to spaces. There are some themes that are single packages, but also more powerful add-ons that let you do a lot of the work inside Confluence - Refinedwiki, Brikit and Themebuilder are the ones to look for (Themebuilder requires some time invested in it, as it's the most powerful, and hence most complex to work with)

However, Atlassian's Service Desk and Confluence are not heavily themed. The Confluence uses "Scroll Versions" to provide many versions of documentation, and most of the rest is light-touch theming.


Tags: jira-service-desk