Background

DotNetNuke provides support for templating at a number of levels (including Portal templates). one of the lesser used templating options is "page" templates (introduced in the 3.2.0 release).

A page template allows you to quickly create pages with some default content already on them e.g. a module or perhaps a set of modules in a particular structure (e.g. an "article" page template might have a html module in the centre but provide a module which shows a tag cloud in the right hand column).

When createing a page a drop down list allows the user to select the template they wish to use. This shows "default" by default, which refers to the Default.page.template file found in the \Portals\_default\Templates folder. Since 5.2.0 a second template has shipped with DotNetNuke called UserProfile.page.template, which is used to set up the user profile by the installer and is not typically used by site admins.

Creating templates

New templates can be created manually by adding new *.template files in the \Portals\_default\Templates folder, but a much easier option is to create them via the UI. This video demonstrates how to do this.

Some people prefer not to have any templated content on new pages, and instead create empty page templates.