Template Interface Issues and Suggestions

We are running Sitefinity 4.1

I have a few suggestions concerning the way templates are displayed and used in Sitefinity. We are working on a very extensive project where we are moving our entire university website into Sitefinity.  At this point, we have over 150 templates.  We have a couple of main templates with most of the others based on those.  The main problems are that the templates are not ordered in any fashion. This applies to the template list on the "Page Templates" page and also to the template list displayed when creating a new page.  To make matters worse, when creating a new template, it is not even created at the bottom or top of the list, but randomly placed somewhere in the middle.  This makes it very tedious to find the correct template.

The other issue is that the "Page Templates" page takes a VERY long time to load when there are that many templates to be rendered. (over 30 seconds when running local) I think that this is due to the way the pages using the template are counted. It looks like, for each template, the code is iterating through the pages to get a count of the pages using the template. We may have up to 100 pages per template. The method of getting the page count needs to be improved to improve the performance of this page.

I also noted that the paging on the Templates page does not work correctly.  As I stated, we have over 150 templates, and the pager at the bottom of the Template page shows 3 pages of templates, but clicking on a number always shows all templates.

The other issue is that we are allowed only one default template. When creating new pages, it will, by default, have the default template applied. Because we are creating such an extensive site and have so many templates, it sure would be nice it a "default" template could be specified at the page node level that would be inherited by any children pages created under that parent node.  Most child pages under a particular parent page node all use the same template. If we could specify the default template for new child pages as a property of the parent, then we would not have to search through 150 unordered templates for the correct template to use since the default specified by the parent node would automatically be used as the default.

Hello Tom,



Thanks for the valuable request!
I will log it as a task and we will include it in our plans for future improvements. I see the lack of this functionality really hinders the work on sites like yours and we will make sure all aspects of your request are fulfilled.

Paging in Templates appears to be e bug we will be working to provide a fix for.

Updated your  Telerik points.

Regards,
Stanislav Velikov
the Telerik team

Hi Tom,

I am writing in order to answer your last question about changing a default template when a page is created.

It is configurable under Administration->Settings->Advanced, DefaultFrontendTemplateId field, which defines
which template should be selected by default when creating a new front-end page.