How to create a project template in XWiki

25 Feb 2021 5 min read

Written by

Andreea Chirica

, Communications and Support Specialist

Imagine that you are invited to work on a project and you start receiving from your colleagues different information about it, from different locations: email threads, drives, sites, even scanned paper files. When you are faced with such situations, your best chance to be productive is to organize all this information into a project template that you could also reuse with each new project. In this article, I describe a manner to structure information that would help achieve a clear template on which you and your colleagues could easily collaborate to gather everything into a dedicated project space.

Your Project Template using a Nested Pages Hierarchy

I added a number of steps on how to create a template based on a group of pages (a parent page and a number of subpages).

I started with the creation of a parent page named "Project Home" and then a number of child pages of this parent page: Project Description (to which I added another child page Project Timeline), Project Organization Team, Project Specifications. Then, on the Project Home, I chose to use a macro that displays all child pages of this parent page.

The next step would be to go to the wiki administration, to the "Content" tab, to the "Page Templates" section and there to add a new template provider (as in the picture below). Be careful at this step to leave the "Terminal Page" option unchecked.

https://xwiki.com/en/download/Blog/how-to-create-project-template/WebHome/adding-project-template-provider.png

Then, you will have to define a name for your template (I chose "Projects Template"), a description (optional step), and, most importantly, the template to be used, which in this case will be the "ProjectTemplate. By doing so, you will recreate each time this group of pages (the "Project Home" with the child pages created at the beginning). The "Terminal Page" option must also be set to "No" in order to take into account the child pages of the "Project Home" when using the template. If you want this group of pages to be created in a specific space, you must add this space in the "Creation restriction" option (I chose to not have a creation restriction).

After adding the settings, save and start creating a new project based on a hierarchy of pages using the Projects Template you will see in the "Create a page template" options, when you create a new page. Check out the result in the gallery below:

Put your imagination into practice even more with what you could add and use in the subpages of your Projects Template. In my example, in Project Timeline, I used the Calendar Pro application to display project events (which are actually set goals and meetings). Don't forget that you can also use the Meetings Pro application to organize meetings and then you could display them in your timeline calendar as well. Invite you project colleagues to vote the meeting ideas through Polls or create Ideas that could bring your project to the next level. In the Projects Specifications, you could display an Office slides presentation that you could edit/update using the OnlyOffice Connector application.

What kind of structure and content would you add to your project template?

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