It’s been nearly a month since we released Confluence Blueprints, ready-made best practices to common business problems. We already showed you how to run effective meetings and share files using two of the blueprints available in Confluence, now let’s take a look at how to customize the various blueprints to match your teams’ business processes.
Customizing Blueprints’ Page Templates
Confluence comes budled with three different blueprints – Meeting Notes, File Lists, and Product Requirements. Each blueprint delivers two different page templates, a page template for the content you’re creating and a page template for the index page that collects that content in one place. See below for an example of the two different Meeting Notes Blueprint page templates:
Any System or Space Administrator can edit any blueprint template to better fit their team’s specific business processes. Clicking ‘Edit’ will launch the template editor where it’s easy to change the content of the templates for Meeting Notes, File Lists, or Product Requirement blueprints.
We massively improved template editing in Confluence 5.1 with features like instructional text which help explain what content to write and how to trigger certain editor features. Also, if you ever want to revert back to the default page template originally packaged in the blueprint, you can do so in a single click.
Adding More Confluence Blueprints
While we’ve provided three blueprints in our initial launch, there are many more on the way. Regardless, we wanted to encourage anyone with a little JavaScript know-how to build their own and leverage the new blueprints framework.
Build Your Own Blueprint
If you would like to build your own Confluence Blueprints, take a look at our developer documentation. It will provide you with more than enough information to get started building blueprints for your users.
Find More Blueprints on the Atlassian Marketplace
It’s easy to distribute custom blueprints for free or sale via the Atlassian Marketplace. Four Marketplace vendors have already partnered with Atlassian to build blueprints that are available for download today, including:
- Strategy canvases by Comalatech for managing tasks and visualizing business processes.
- Online diagrams by Gliffy for building professional-quality flow and organizational charts.
- Polls by Simplenia for creating and sharing simple polls to make group decisions.
- Evernote Importer by StiltSoft to bring notes into Confluence for sharing.
Browse, find, and try Blueprints in Confluence
We’ve made it dead simple for any user to find new Blueprints that will help them get their work done faster by embedding the Atlassian Marketplace inside Confluence. Any user can browse available Blueprints and request that they be installed by their System Administrator. The possibilities are endless.
What Are You Waiting For?
The sky is the limit with Confluence Blueprints. Get started using, customizing, or building your own now.
New to Confluence?
Get up and running in a matter of minutes with a free Confluence OnDemand trial.
Ready to upgrade?
Check out the full release notes and start seeing real results with Confluence Blueprints today. OnDemand Customers: You’ve have been auto-upgraded with Confluence Blueprints!