These tips are not required, but we think they make Zen Foundation easier to use and maintain.

Turn off any unused themes

If you're not going to use default theme plugins, it will clean up the GUI and help avoid errors to disable them, as follows (note that not all of these are necessarily installed - it depends on your Confluence version):

From the Administration Console > Plugins screen, disable the following theme plug-ins, unless you are using them or plan to use them:

• Classic Left Navigation Theme
• Clickr Theme
• Documentation Theme
• Easy Reader Theme
  
  

Simplify default content

The default content is set in the Admin Console, and is used to auto-populate the home page of a new space or personal space. The default settings are not designed for a multi-column layout. If you're using Zen Foundation as a global default, we suggest simplifying the defaults as follows:

From the Administration Console > Default Space Content screen:

1. • Click the Space Home Pages link, and replace the text with something like:
   • Click Save.
   • Click the Personal Space Home Pages link and replace the text with something like:
   • Click Save.
     
     

Use an Administrator Space for Zen Space Layout pages.

For one or several spaces, it can be helpful to set up what we call a 'dojo,' or administrator space, to which your other spaces point for shared Master Pages, such as the Menu, Footer, or Master Page Layouts. We recommend this because:

• Separating out the layout pages from the content spaces can be structurally helpful, and ease organization and management of your spaces
• Having a separate space for your layout pages provides an easy way to stop recent updates on your layout pages (such as .zen.master) from creeping into macro content (such as Recently Updated).

Use "Edit Entire Page" With Caution

The Toolbar's Page menu includes an Edit Entire Page option for administrator users. This option is available to administrators only for two reasons: first, basic users are likely to find full page macros/wiki markup intimidating or confusing; more importantly, because some Zen macros contains auto-generated Zen data, manually editing these macros should be approached with care.

Note that Zen Section macros have a Zen Section ID parameter, which is auto-generated and must contain a unique number to identify that section on the page. Also, order matters. Zen arranges Zen Sections to column and appearance, so creating sections or moving them around using the Edit Entire Page view is discouraged.

Zen provides the Edit Entire Page option to facilitate copying full page content or, if necessary, troubleshooting individual macros.