Custom templates for pages and sections
Plasmic has several types of templates that help you get started quickly:
- Project templates, also called starter projects, which you can find when creating a new project from the main dashboard (after you login)
- Page templates, which you can find when creating a new page in Plasmic (from the top toolbar)
- Section templates, which you can find in the insert menu
When editing a website project, Plasmic by default comes with a set of default page and section templates.
However, you can hide or change these to your own. This is useful especially when starting to use Plasmic at scale—you may not want your editors to keep seeing generic default templates, and may want to replace them with templates that are relevant to your team.
This feature is available to users in the Scale plan and above.
These template settings are applied at the workspace level, so will take effect across all projects in a given workspace.
To set this up, go to your Workspace in the dashboard, and from the three-dots menu button to the right of the workspace title, select “Edit content editor mode”.
In the bottom of the modal, you’ll find the place to edit the default set of components.
You’ll need to define the templates in JSON format, specifying the project IDs and component names for each of your pages and sections. (Sections are also defined as components.)
From this point on, anyone who is in a project within this workspace will see only the templates you indicated.
Note: inserting a template will insert the latest published version of that component. So make sure you publish the project that houses the templates for it to be accessible.
Differences from components
Both section templates and components are ways to reuse assets across projects. Furthermore, templates are also defined as components. What’s the difference? When should you use each?
Components are intended to be an “always-consistent” building block that you reuse across your site. Any customization should be done through the props/slots/variants that it establishes. There’s no way to edit the insides of a component you’ve imported from another project. They are always kept consistent across all instances of the component.
Templates, on the other hand, are intended as a “starting point” that users are expected to change from what it was initially. Templates are defined as components, but when users insert a template, they are inserting the contents of the component. They are always inserted “detached” from the component. This is true recursively—any components used within the template component are also inserted “detached.”