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What is Post Templates?

If you find yourself writing posts and pages on a regular basis which have the same structure, then this plugin would be a great addition to your WordPress plugin arsenal. Written by Vincent Prat, Post Templates plugin helps you save time blogging by letting you save and recall templates for writing posts and pages.

Screenshots

To create a template from scratch, you can use the new admin bar group “Templates.”

After clicking “New Post Template”, you will be brought to the edit template page.

After you’re finished creating your template, you can create a post from that template through the template edit page itself or the template management page.

To create a template from an old post, you can use the “Templatize” button on the post listing page.

What I Like About It

What I love most about this plugin is simply what it does. I am a WordPress plugin developer myself so I do a lot of “plugin updated” blog entries that all have the same structure. Before this plugin, I mimicked this functionality by keeping my own templates as posts in draft status. The problem with my technique is the big blue “publish” button and my tendency to click on colorful things. Classifying these template posts as real templates and removing the publish button just makes sense. There will be no confusion between which posts are a templates and which posts are actual drafts ready to be published. In addition to these benefits, this plugin saves me a lot of time navigating, copying, and pasting my own version of post templates.

The next thing I like about this plugin is the seamless integration with the WordPress admin interface. Just activate the plugin and it looks like your WordPress installation was shipped with this feature. By that, I mean the user interface is quite intuitive and I didn’t need to read any documentation to figure out how to use the plugin.

Another cool thing about this plugin is that it keeps user roles in mind. Authors are allowed to view and use post templates. Editors are allowed to to view, use, create, edit, and delete post templates. Administrators are allowed to do all of those things plus modify plugin options.

Last, there is a support forum up for this plugin and Vincent seems to be quite responsive to questions.

Possible Areas of Improvement

As of version 3.3.0, here are some drawbacks I found in this plugin:

• It would be nice to have an ability to import and export templates so that users can use the same templates on multiple blogs. Currently, the importer feature is really a converter which upgrades the old plugin’s version of templates to be compatible with the new version.
• I also notice that custom fields are not saved for templates. I can definitely make use of custom fields in templates.
• It might be useful to have a link to create a template from the edit post page. Currently, the only way to create a template from a post is through the post list page.
• Assuming the previous request gets fulfilled, it might also be nice to have the ability to hide the “templatize” button on the post listing page. This is because I don’t think people create templates that often. The button is taking up space when it doens’t need to.

Final Words

If you want to save time writing the same type of posts/pages, you should definitely give Post Templates a try. I know I’m happy with it.

Are you currently using Post Templates? How do you like it? What additions would you like to see in this plugin?

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