In this post I’ll show you how you can create a page and make it available for others to use as a starting point for their pages. You can create templates from a modern page or a modern news page in a communication site. I believe this function is great for the communication/marketing department, that often have defined standards for things like headers, images etc. for different kind of articles and news.

Modern pages become more and more useful with new features coming out like this one, and well it’s not yet so powerful as page layouts was in the classic publishing site, but it’s a step in the right direction, and sooner or later modern page will bridge that that gap of functionality compared to the old page layout model.

Page templates was originally announced from Microsoft at Ignite last year, together with a lot of other cool stuff. Some features that were then shown on Ignite have been released, and some features will be launched this summer and autumn. You can check Microsoft’s Roadmap to get the latest updates for all announced features here.

In the moment of writing this, Page templates is released for the targeted release mode, so if you don’t see it in your tenant, it just to wait a bit until it shows up.

Let’s create a news page and save this as a template

  • Create a communication site.
  • On the start page, click News and select News post.
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  • Select Basic text, one of the featured Templates and click on the button Create post.
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  • Create some example layout with rows and columns and add some typical image and adjust settings for the title area’s image etc. until you think this page will be a good starting point next time you’ll create a news page, maybe something like this:

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  • Next step is to Post this page, just click at the Post news button. When you do this, this page will be shown in all roll up web parts that will include pages from this page. Maybe you have a News web part onto the start page of you Intranet? No worries, you can just delete this page after you have created a template out of this page.
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  • Right after you have Posted this page, the Promote link will appear onto the command bar, click this link.
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  • You can now save the page as a template, click at “Save as page template” on the panel to the right that will be shown.
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  • Now give your Page template a name, type this in the header area in the web part.7
  • Click the save button to save the page.
  • All templates will be stored in a specific folder in the same site from where you have created your template. See site content > Site Pages and in the Templates folder.9
  • Next time when you’ll create a News page, you can then from the start page, click at News and select News post. You’ll now see your page template here!10
  • If you want to have another icon for your template, you can change that if you edit the properties of the template. This icon doesn’t have to be the same as the actual header image in the template.

More thing you can use page templates to is to if you create a column in the page library, let’s say a choice column called “department” and tag a bunch of page templates like Marketing, IT, sales and so on. Then it could be a way to separate different kind of news articles easy with help of the news web part based on the page property, but I have not tested this yet, just an idea.

Note that you must have permissions enough to be able to create a template, such as site owner. And oh, don’t forget to change the image and the text in this new page you have created before publishing the page.

Limitations

A Page template can only be created per site collection, so if you have several different site collections for your Intranet, there’s no support to share such template across site collections by out of the box. This feature is new, but probably this concept will mature in such a way that we will receive support for provisioning templates similar to what we can already do with site designs.

That’s all for this time, enjoy!