As part of Saturday Sitecore Learning series, till now we looked into,

By this time, I assume that you have both Sitecore and Visual Studio project setups in your machine, If not, please go through these two posts, Sitecore installation, Setting up Visual Studio Solution and try setting them up.

From now onwards we will look into core Sitecore concepts in more detail manner.

First let’s explore one of the important part of Sitecore, which are Templates. Understanding the Templates, is very important for developers, as selecting the correct template type, dictates overall experience of managing content. Templates is a very vast topic, and can’t be covered in a single post, so it will be spanning across multiple posts.

Template Fundamentals

Templates, also commonly referred as Data Templates, which are basic building blocks of any content in Sitecore. Every piece of content (page or components) in Sitecore needs a data template to define what it is.

To understand it better, Templates can be compared to Class (In object oriented programming) definitions,

  • Each Class contain fields with their respective data types, similarly every Template contain fields, with their respective field types. (Ex: Single-line text)
  • Any number of instances can be created based on a class, similarly we can create any number of content items based on a single template.
  • Class supports inheritance, similarly templates also supports inheritance, in which a single template can inherit from multiple base templates, to mainly share the common fields.

Before creating any content, first we need to create a Template with fields and their types. In a nutshell, Templates specify the data fields and many other settings that can be applied to content upon creation.

All Templates are defined under /sitecore/templates in Sitecore tree structure.

templates-tree

To open templates, we can open them either from Content Editor, or from Template Navigator, which is present in Start menu. (Start menu is available in Desktop mode)

template-manager

While exploring default home page, we noticed that home page content item, is using Sample item template, which can be found in /sitecore/templates/Sample/Sample Item

default-home-template

Following are some of the terms, we need to understand, before we do hands on creating templates. Let’s look into each of them more detail in coming up posts.

  • Fields – Field Sections, Field Types, Field Source, and Field Validation.
  • Template Inheritance
  • Standard Values
  • Template types

In next post we will look into Sitecore fields.

References

Happy Learning 🙂