Ever wanted to hide some elements in Atlassian Confluence?

Ghost -

Please have a look at this screenshot. Look at it carefully and think about what you can see. Or, more importantly, what you cannot see!

Exactly! It’s a Confluence page but there’s lots of elements missing you might be familiar with. There’s no create button in the header, no breadcrumb above the page title, no buttons or menus on the top right, etc. Mostly, there’s only a title and a text and nothing else. But you know what’s funny? It looks pretty clean! But of course, there’s now lots of functionality missing. I really can’t do anything right now besides just reading this page. But maybe this can be intended in certain scenarios? Maybe there are cases in which I just want to hide some elements of a Confluence page and clean things up or restrict certain interactions?

This was exactly our motivation behind our app – guess its name – HideElements. Having it installed on your Confluence instance gives page editors the ability to define clearly what elements should be visible on this page. By including a macro, the user will see a great deal of choices:

What’s really cool about this is that whenever you add another element to hide on the lefthand sidebar of the macro browser, the item will disappear on the righthand preview side. This gives you a really good idea of the effect of toggling the visibility of your elements on your page. If I now just disable all of these checkboxes, the preview will appear very differently.


One might argue that finally all the great functionality is back. But one could also say the clutter is back. We’re not arguing here that Confluence’s feature aren’t great! We’re just saying you might not need all of them all the time. And also, you might not want to change permissions all the time. We think that once in a while you’ll just want something lightweight to control the appearance of a page. And this is exactly what HideElements is for!

HideElements is freely available on the Atlassian Marketplace and we’ve gotten lots of great feedback. So go ahead and give it a shot! And make sure to let us know if you have any problems or feature suggestions! After all, there might be a lot more elements we could hide that we just haven’t thought of yet.

Where to go?