Bits and Bytes

By CAROLE | Published: MAY 12, 2010

We know how hard you work to get your pages just so: a lot of thought goes into how you arrange pages for lesson plans or project briefs, and a lot of work goes into building those pages. Page templates are a great way to make all that planning go farther without any extra work.

So what are page templates, exactly?
A “page template” is a special kind of wiki page. Just like any wiki page, you can edit it, put text and images on it, embed widgets into it, save it — and then go back to edit it some more later. But it’s special because you can use a page template as a foundation for as many new pages as you would like.

What can I do with page templates?
Most new wiki pages are empty by default. But if you use a template when you’re making a new page, that page will already be filled with whatever text, images, widgets, and formatting you built into the template.

Say, for example, you have several groups of students working on a lab. You know that they’ll all be taking the same steps, and recording the same kinds of observations. Create a template called Lab Notebook. Then, when the students are ready to create new pages to keep their records, they can start a lab notebook page that you know will prompt them to record the right items in the right places.

Or say you are using your wiki to plan a conference. You’re going to have several different breakout sessions on each day, and you want to have individual pages for each breakout session. If you start by building a Breakout Session page template, you won’t have to bother formatting each page by time-consuming page. Just pick the template off the drop-down, and you’re ready to go.

Well, that makes sense. Now how do I use them?
Nothing could be simpler: go to Manage Wiki > Templates, and name your new template. If you want, you can build your template based on the content of a page that you’ve already done. Edit the page template the way you would edit any other page, and hit Save.

When you make a new page with the New Page link in the action bar, pick the template you want from the Use a Template drop-down. When you start a new page by following an existing link to a page that doesn’t exist yet, select the template from the drop-down list before you hit the Edit button. Either way, everything you built into the page template will already be on the page by the time you start editing.

If you ever want to make changes to one of your templates, go to Manage Wiki >Pages and find the template on the list. You can tell which pages are templates because it says so right in the page name: my Testing page template, for example, would be space.template.Testing. Changing a page template won’t do anything to any pages that already exist; it will just have those changes ready for the next time you use the template.