Customize your Confluence Navigation menu

Information overkill? Not a chance! We’ll show you how to really pimp up your day-to-day work with a customized Confluence navigation.

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Confluence Cloud is excellent for knowledge management and collaboration for cross-functional teams. Finding your way around Confluence is essential to work as efficiently as possible. This can be difficult and confusing when it comes to Confluence navigation, especially during onboarding. In this article, we therefore explain how to create a customized Confluence navigation that boosts employee engagement and performance. Let’s go!

Confluence navigation menu on default

To understand why a custom navigation bar and custom dropdown lists in Confluence offer added value, it is worth understanding what exactly the purpose of a navigation menu is. The word navigation is derived from Latin and French and means something like course calculation. A functioning navigation bar therefore helps us to stay on course and guide the ship to a safe harbor. If you are trapped in a thousand dropdown lists, you will never reach your destination.
It is therefore crucial that you customize the Confluence navigation so that it fits your company (your ship).

By default, the Confluence navigation can be slightly adjusted with a company logo and custom colors.

But the true magic of a fully customized side menu is only revealed with appanvil’s Mantra.

Navigating Confluence pages with Mantra

We all know the problem: Important information is published: bookmark. Some interesting page is published: Click on Watcher. Then another relevant company news update: New bookmark. Little by little, the bookmarks for supposedly important topics accumulate, and the “Recent” tab in the Confluence navigation menu can’t be of much help.
To cope with this overload of information, there’s Mantra’s navigation.

As you can see, Mantra’s navigation menu is directly integrated into your Confluence Cloud navigation. In addition, Mantra comes with a fully customizable navigation bar that is accessible throughout Confluence. This allows you to keep your crew members on the right course. Simply customize the appearance of navigation items with icons, images or new meaningful titles — new team members in particular will thank you for this intuitive onboarding experience.

Two Confluence navigation menus?

Wondering how two Confluence menus can help with onboarding or your day-to-day work? We’ll tell you: With the Mantra navigation menu, you have the most personalized user experience possible in Confluence Cloud. On the one hand, the original Confluence menu bar, which more experienced users may already know well, remains intact. On the other hand, the new navigation bar with Mantra allows you to guide users through numerous pages of valuable Confluence knowledge in a targeted manner.

Personalized dropdown lists in Confluence

As illustrated by the image below, you can customize the dropdown list in the Mantra navigation bar. This allows you to create personalized menus that are tailored to specific user profile fields or Confluence groups.

Thanks to Mantra in the Confluence Cloud, customizable navigation is not a luxury that is only available to admins. Every user can customize their dashboard according to their needs. For example:

Customization of your Confluence Dashboard

Information overkill is not possible with Mantra! You have the choice of which feeds you want to display. Simply select the relevant posts from the Feeds’ menu in the sidebar. This way, you can customize Confluence to your liking and avoid being bombarded with irrelevant information before your first coffee.

On the left-hand side of the Mantra menu, you can filter by news, posts, or events and further customize your Confluence Cloud journey.

You have these choices:

• Dashboard: Quick overview of your whole organization

• News: Company news written by admins or super users

• Posts: Everything your colleagues want to share

• Events: All about where’s the next summer party

• Social Wall: Content of different company’s social media accounts

• People: Your people directory to get along and find the people you’re looking for

• Settings: Only for Admins

The admin predefines your selection options. How does this work? Like this:

Your guide to create a custom navigation menu in Confluence

To create a custom navigation menu in Mantra, you must have admin rights for Confluence. The exact steps are:

• Install Mantra from the Atlassian Marketplace

• Access Mantra within your Confluence instance.

• Locate the action button situated beside your profile picture in Mantra’s sidebar, then choose Administration.

• Select the Navigation tab and confirm that the Mantra as Home option is activated.

• A sample menu bar is provided by default. You can activate, deactivate or duplicate this as you wish. Let’s start by editing it once. To achieve this, click on Edit.

• As you can create several menus, you can give them different names.
  
• Next, you can further personalize the Confluence navigation by limiting the visibility of the navigation bar. For example, you may want to set up a specific menu for admins only, in which case you would select the condition: Confluence Group > is any of > Select the desired target group.
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• Under Add Entry, you can insert an endless number of navigation dropdown menus into your Confluence Cloud.

• The entries can all be re-sorted using drag-and-drop. Thus, you can also add child posts to higher-level navigation lists, just like in regular Confluence.
• Add a description for the post, a Confluence link or an external one and don’t forget to add a customized icon to make navigation even easier for your employees.
• On the right-hand side of the editing menu, you will see a preview of your customized Confluence navigation.
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• Click on Save and you’re done!

Spice up your header in Confluence

Last but not least, let’s take a look at how we can customize the core in Confluence: The header. Imagine it’s Monday morning, you’re out of the house without breakfast, but you’re still late, start Confluence and see the boring default layout.

And then imagine you start Confluence and see something like this:

For example, a little something nice for Independence Day, Christmas, or a company event can be placed prominently.

Making a difference, right?

Whatever you wish for, how you can pimp the navigation in Confluence.

Mantra makes it possible.
It’s still the Confluence you love. But supercharged.

Try Manta out for yourself for 30 days via the Atlassian Marketplace.

And if you want more detailed information on how exactly you can customize your Confluence navigation to your specific use cases with Mantra, simply book a free, no-obligation demo. Looking forward to getting in touch!

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