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Your templates library

Templates are saved starting points. A template is inert: nothing in your library is on your live site until you deliberately use it. That is the whole point of the library — it means installing something from the marketplace can never publish pages to a site you are running.

Find it at Templates in a site's navigation, alongside Screens, Layouts and Components — the three things a template can produce.

The three kinds​

KindWhat it holdsWhat you get from it
PageA screen's contentA new screen, unpublished
ComponentAn element treeA reusable component, or a drop onto a screen
LayoutPage chrome — header, footer, navigationA new shared layout

Installing from the marketplace​

Installing a marketplace template adds it to your library and publishes nothing. A site template arrives as one page template per page it contains, so you choose which of them you actually want, and when.

This is deliberate: browsing and installing should never be able to change a site that real people are looking at. If the template was designed around a particular theme, that theme travels with it rather than being applied to your site.

Saving something as a template​

Look for Save as template:

  • Screens list — saves the page's published content
  • Layouts list — saves the layout, including its content slot
  • Components list — saves the component definition

A page template captures the published version of a screen. If a screen has never been published there is nothing to capture, and Aglyn will tell you to publish it first rather than saving an empty template that fails later.

The original is never touched. Saving a template copies it.

Using a template​

Use creates something new from the template — the template itself stays in your library, so you can use it as many times as you like.

  • A page template asks for a name and an address, then creates the page and publishes it. If the address is already taken, Aglyn adds a number rather than overwriting the page that's there.
  • Component and layout templates just create the component or layout; there is no address to pick.

If a template defines placeholders, you'll be asked to fill them in first — the values are substituted into the content as it's created. A template might use {{who}} in its copy and ask you for "Who".

Nothing you create is linked back to the template afterwards. Editing a page will never change the template, and updating a template will never change pages you already made.

Where a template came from​

Every template shows a badge:

  • Saved here — you created it on this site
  • Marketplace — installed from a marketplace listing, with its version
  • Starter — one of Aglyn's first-party starter templates

That badge is set by Aglyn, not by whoever made the template, so a listing cannot claim to be something it is not.

First-party starters​

Aglyn's starter sites (Landing Page, Business, Portfolio, the two Shop starters) are ordinary templates in your library — not a separate, locked-down kind. Every site gets its own copy, so you can open a starter in the besigner, edit it, keep versions of it, and use it to create pages exactly like a template you saved yourself. They carry the Starter badge, and they don't count against your plan's template allowance.

A multi-page starter arrives as one template per page (the Shop starters are five), and Start from a template still shows them grouped as one card that creates all of the pages at once.

Your Templates list groups them the same way: one row per starter, labelled with its page count, and its actions act on all of those pages — Use creates every page, and Delete removes every page. Open the row to see the pages individually; each one is an ordinary template you can edit, use or delete on its own from there.

Because your copy is yours, editing a starter is safe: Aglyn will not overwrite it later. Delete one you don't want and it stays deleted.

Templates are per-site​

A template lives on the site you saved it to. That keeps a template next to the screens, layouts and components it was built from.

Marketplace plugins and add-ons work differently: those install once for the whole organization and apply to every site, and a site can override the organization's choice for itself.

Deleting​

Deleting a template removes it from your library. Anything you already created from it is unaffected — a page made from a template is a normal page, with no ongoing link back to it.