Templates and Blueprints
- Adil Nasri
What are Templates and Blueprints?
Templates are pages with predefined content. This means that a space administrator can create templates using the default Confluence editor. You can also use basic variables, which are brought up for consideration to the author when creating a new page in the "template assistant."
Blueprints are more powerful than templates. Atlassian introduced blueprints to Confluence about in 2014. Blueprints are based on templates, and so they may appear to be similar in some ways, but overall they have a lot more functionality. As a result, they greatly simplify the page creation process.
You can set up blueprints so that, for example, page titles are automatically applied. You can also create dynamic overview pages for each space. You can also use more variables from different fields types. When you use templates you need to do so from a Wizard-style user interface. Blueprints, on the other hand, are displayed more intuitively from the "Create" menu item via a form.
Unlike templates, however, programming skills (Velocity and Java) are required for working with blueprints.
Advantages and disadvantages of templates
Advantages | Disadvantages |
|---|---|
(Area) administrators can create templates directly in the system. | Template Wizard isn't intuitive; it doesn't look like it's from the same software. |
Changes can be made quickly. | Variables are only rudimentarily supported and aren't very helpful. |
| Only pages are supported. |
| There is only one default icon for all templates. |
Advantages and disadvantages of blueprints
Advantages | Disadvantages |
|---|---|
It has a much better user interface, made possible by having variables which are controlled via an intuitive input form. | Blueprints must be programmed with Velocity and Java. |
It has more field type support for variables (user mentions, keywords, etc.). | Blueprints can only be installed by the Confluence administrator on a global level. |
It has predefined settings for page titles (prefix, variable support). | Changes (e.g. new variables, error correction) must always be made directly in the programming code. |
Automatic creation of overview pages. |
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Icons can be selected individually. |
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Supports additional content types such as blog entries or sections. |
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Blueprint Creator - the perfect fusion
Blueprints may allow fast, user-friendly, structured and dynamic data acquisition, and in this respect they are a step ahead of templates: why then, are templates used more frequently? It's because programming knowledge is a big enough hurdle for users that they end up missing out on many of blueprints' strengths, using coding-free templates instead.
Blueprint Creator now brings you all the strengths of blueprints with none of the hurdles that come from having an exclusively coding interface. With this app you can integrate the functions of blueprints into templates, all without any programming knowledge. Thanks to Blueprint Creator, now you can have the advantages of both blueprints and templates. You can also create blueprints for areas and blog entries.