Since I started working at Atlassian almost 2 years ago, we’ve wanted to give the User Group site a makeover. We’ve finally done it! Check it out! Here’s the story:
The Background.
We run our user group site on a public extranet that runs on Confluence. Confluence was perfect because it allows us to make changes without bugging our website developers. In addition, we could give permissions to user group leaders so they could modify the content on their respective user groups.
For many groups this page is home base, hosting all of the groups info including RSVPs, agenda and updates. The organizers each have unlimited access to this page, and don’t need anything from me to make changes and add new meetings. However, I’m never left out of the loop. I’m “following” the user group space. So when any change is made to any part of the site, I am notified via email.
It’s also simple for me to pull outside content in using macros. For example, the map feature at the bottom of the new homepage is pulled directly from Google maps using the Widget macro.
The Problem.
Plain and simple the site was ugly, and not very usable. I was the ahem.. designer.. of the user group page. And unfortunately the user group page didn’t fair any better then my ceramics in 9th grade pottery.
The Solution.
I reached out to our Confluence Product Marketing Specialist, Matt “the Wiki Whisperer” Hodges, for help. He contacted our partner, RefinedWiki. RefinedWiki’s mission is to deliver a powerful and user-friendly wiki solutions. They created a beautiful Confluence Theme for the new user group page. The new site keeps all the benefits of the old site, but…looks pretty, yay! Let us know how you like it.
Want to start your own user group? Here’s how…
Old version.png-thumb-250x169.jpg)
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New version
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Read more about the design in a guest blog post from Refined Wiki.
