Creating a project template

Project templates are the foundation of your projects. As the content owner, you use the project template to set up an initial flow and structure to your project. To create a project template, you must first create a project. After you create a project and define project logistics, you can save the project as a project template for others to use.

1. Open the project menu, and click New Project.
2. In the New Projects section, select a template from the Create a project from menu to create a project.
3. Enter a name for the project in the field. By default, you see your user ID and the date as a sample project name.
4. Click Create.
5. Click Manage Project to define project logistics. Content owners think about who needs access to the project, who must approve the project, how many approvals are needed, and other publishing options. From Manage Project, content owners see the Project and Properties tabs.

   From the Project tab, you can change the name, display name, work with project items, set up project options, set up approval, and create custom actions for the project.

   Project name and Display Name

   You can change the name of the project and how the name displays to users from the site toolbar. The project name is a unique ID for the project that is used in the project URL. The display name is the name that displays on your site for the project and can use UTF-16 characters. Use the display name when you want the name that displays in your site for the project to be different from the name of your project.

   Project items

   Content items that are created in this view are not part of the template that you create.

   In this view, the content owner sees a quick view of the status of all content items in the project. The content owner can approve, read, edit, and delete content items.

   Some content can be created only from the library area of the site. You can use this area of Manage Project to access a library to create content.

   Publish options

   • Select Date to publish all items in your project on a specific date. All content items must be in a Publish Pending state before the project is published. If you decide later to publish earlier than the specified date, you can click Publish in the project to publish the project sooner.
   • Select Manual to manually publish all the items in the project after you click Publish. All content items must be in a Publish Pending state to manually publish the project. The Publish button is not activated until all items in the project are in a pending state. Only users with editor access or higher can publish a project.
   • Select Automatic to publish all items in the project as soon as the project reaches a Publish Pending state.

   Approval

   Projects are a great way to review and approve content. Use this area of Manage Project to add approvers to the project. You must also decide whether this project needs all approvers to approve the project before publishing or if you need a single approver.

   Custom action

   You can assign custom actions to run when a project enters a specific state. For example, you can automatically reject a project if the project is in review for a specific duration. You might automatically delete a project when it is successfully published. You can send email notifications that let others know when the project is published.

   From the Properties tab, you can add authors and owners to the project, control access, see the history of changes to the project.

   Add authors and owners to this project

   As soon as you click the Properties tab of Manage Projects, you can start adding authors and other owners to this project. Projects are about collaborating with others. For others to contribute to the project, you must add authors to this project.

   Access

   Collaboration on a project can ranges from reviewing content, adding content, editing content, and more. As the content owner, you can assign the best access level to people that work on a project.

   History

   You can see a quick glance of work that has been done in the project. For example, you can see who created a document for a project or who made the last update to a document.

6. Click Save and Close when you finish managing the project.
7. Click More > Create Project Template. The setup of this project is now saved as a template and uses your project name as the template name.