I see:
“Create Shared Templates and Styles – Design your very own site templates and styles, then make them available to the group. Templates save time by allowing you to reuse assets, and your team will produce consistent work because you’ll have precise control over the content it can access.”
My company has a Team Plan and we create multiple projects based on the same styles and classes. What is the difference between starting a project from a template and just duplicating a site and starting with that instead? I thought that if we utilized a template and changes were made in the source template, then sites based on that template will update with the new styles. Is this a wrong assumption? Because I’m not seeing what is the benefit of using a template if I can just duplicate a site and start from there.
Both methods work the same way. But, say you create a full website then duplicate it. If that new project doesn’t need the same pages, elements, or layout, you’ll need to delete all of those to start from a good base.
With a shared template, you can create a good foundation to start from for all projects.
I was hoping that templates would allow for a source site style which could (if desired) populate sites based on that template. Since the Team plan doesn’t yet allow for simultaneous Team members to use the Designer, I thought this might be a workaround…
Also, as far as I can tell, there is no difference between a “Template” and creating a site as a base starting point and using it as a “Template”. So the Team plan’s “shared template” feature seems less valuable than I originally hoped. [/whining]
From what I’ve noticed when testing the templates on our team plan:
A template design cannot be freely modified once it’s created into a team template. It’s more ‘locked in’ if you will. To make changes, your team must either (A) duplicate the design, modify it and set it up as a new template, or (B) unlock the template, then modify it, and set it as a template again.
The only other way this is different compared to duplicating another existing design and using that as a template, is that ‘templates’ show up as an option when you click the ‘create new site’ button from the team dashboard; It shows up next to the ‘blank site’ option where you designate a name/url for your site.
In can imagine this may be valuable to some teams, but currently our workflow doesn’t depend on the team templates and we similarly duplicate an existing design – which is more like a ‘starting point’ with some common elements, interactions and classes already created.
