Does anyone have experience with BrickIt Theme Press?
Asked by Dan Hoyer:

Just looking for some anecdotal (and preferably not sales) stories about using Theme Press on a large user level. We've just recently fought with customization and upgrade issues with RefinedWiki, and would like some on-the-ground gotchas or bonuses with using Theme Press.

Side note: our previous usage of RefinedWiki was global, and we will definitely not be using Theme Press the same way. However, it will manage most of the customer-facing, view-only pages and spaces.


Answers:
author: Jonathan Simonoff
body: We've been pretty happy with Theme Press. It has allowed much more customization than you can get without it -- you can completely hide the Confluence interface, or hide it by default but let people get to it. Menus work great.

We really are only using it for one format right now, with another group experimenting with using it for another format. I'm a bit concerned that we will have an internal support problem if other people start using it -- there are certain key things you need to do that require confluence admin access, and the ability to mess up other themes.

I thought it was moderately difficult to learn to use, mainly because at times you need to adjust things in different places, which are sometimes are to find. You are instructed to only do style development on a dev system, so you really should have one of those. (I have in limited instances turned on style development mode on our production system and nothing has blown up, but they advise you not to do it.)

It has some confusing features for authors -- you can have multiple editable regions on a page, which is cool until you are trying to get to the right region and for some reason can't find it. (There's an "edit all page" function that they always insist you should almost never use, but I find I have to resort to regularly.) You don't have to make your pages hard to edit, but if you want to use tabbed pages or multiple columns, things kind of naturally get complicated.

OK, all that sounds negative, but I don't mean it that way. I've asked a lot of it, and it has done the job, and considering all of its functionality, it is remarkably easy to use. I can't compare it to Refined Wiki. I did look at it a couple of times over the years, but never actually used it.


author: Dan Hoyer
body: Exactly what I was looking for @Jonathan Simonoff, thanks again! I'm really impressed with their layouts and the built-in macros are very cool.


author: Steve Rhodes
body: @Jonathan Simonoff: How many users is your Confluence installation? We are also looking seriously at Theme Press for hundreds of users, perhaps eventually a thousand. Is there a performance overhead?

@Boots Wang I dont mind comments from the Brikit side if you have anything that can reassure me that we are not gonna face a big overhead when we scale because of theming. BTW, good to speaks to at the Summit last, year. Its what started the ball rolling!

comments: author: Jonathan Simonoff
body: We have several thousand users overall.I haven't noticed any performance hit from Theme Press. You do need to be careful about theme development mode -- that is a hit, but with that turned off it doesn't seem like a lot of overhead.


author: Boots Wang
body: Upgrading is a big pain point for Confluence with heavy customizations (look and feel or otherwise), and this is the main design consideration when we created Theme Press. We call it "future-proof" which means that your designs are transferred nicely when you upgrade (even when Confluence comes out with major UI changes). Too many times we've seen people stuck with something highly customized and cannot upgrade - our tool takes that out of the equation.

Here's a page that showcases various built-in macros that comes with Brikit Theme Press (view only page): <http://bit.ly/1HZaCUG>

(When you install Theme Press, you have the option of populating a demo space with all the stuff you see there and can freely edit or copy/paste.)

Feel free to drop me a note if you have any additional questions as you explore the tool.

comments: author: Dan Hoyer
body: Thanks @Boots Wang , we continued to be impressed by the tool in testing, and have since purchased! So far a great investment.


author: Mitchell Desmarais
body: @Boots Wang I have been trying to figure out how to get this theme working for 3 days. I was able to install the theme and install the demo site but whenever I log in I am presented with the confluence dashboard. I understand the customization of pages but I cannot for the life of me figure out how to create the default page. I switched over from refined wiki for how great the ui can look for clients but I am looking at switching back to refined wiki because the documentation is rather sparse on how to administer theme press


author: Elvira McIntyre
body: hello, I'm looking for some help in where I can find the theme press default space (i need to access the architect pages in order to customize the menu bar and general site structure). any help on how to do this would be much appreciated. perhaps I need to create a default space? i've been looking for it so long, i wonder if it exists. thanks.


Tags: confluence-administration