Confluence 5.0 does not include the Easy Reader theme. We are moving towards a single Confluence theme that presents a simplified default experience. At the same time, we want to make it easy for add-on developers to extend Confluence with custom themes. Our analysis has shown that very few Confluence sites use the Easy Reader theme.
What will happen on upgrade
If your Confluence site currently uses the Easy Reader theme, your site and the spaces that use the theme will be automatically transferred to the default theme on the upgrade to Confluence 5.0.
Why we removed the Easy Reader theme
The Easy Reader theme was originally designed to give people an easier way to read Confluence content – narrow width, larger fonts increased contrast, etc. Many of these issues are addressed by the updated default theme being introduced in Confluence 5. For example, we now have a larger default font size and the width of the page is narrower due to the sidebar. Plus, the new default theme in Confluence 5 provides a number of new features, like shortcut links, that aren't available in the Easy Reader theme. These factors reduced the need for the Easy Reader theme quite a bit.
The Easy Reader theme was designed to give people an easier way to read Confluence content – narrow width, larger fonts and so on. Many of these issues are addressed by the new Atlassian Design Guidelines introduced in Confluence 5.0. We now have a larger default font size, the width of the page is narrower due to the sidebar, and so on. This reduced the need for this theme quite a bit.
Additionally, many web browsers these days (Firefox, Safari, Mobile Safari) ship with a 'Reader' mode which the user can enable to remove all styling from the system and format the page content in a column in the middle. Those that don't have a mode have popular extensions (iReader, Tidy Reader) or bookmarklets (Readability) to provide this functionality. We don't want to maintain features in the application that are better served by browser features. In this case, browser extensions or settings actually do a better job too – the end user is in control of the readability of their page, rather than the space administrator or site administrator.
Feedback welcome
While we do apologize for the disruption this causes you, we think in the long run you'll find the Confluence 5.0 design to be a major improvement over the previous design. If you would like to give us feedback on this change, please add a comment to this page. We are especially interested to know which features of the Easy Reader theme you use and value the most.
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