Template

A template is a collection of components, functionality, and design traits which determine how a type of content looks and behaves on the website. In discovery, we often use this word to help us understand how different groups of content, such as landing pages or standard content pages, are related and what characteristics they share in terms of what content should be on the page. In many cases, especially at the beginning of projects, we talk about templates in terms of pages and post types, such as a homepage template, landing page template, or profiles template.

During the wireframing and development stages, you’ll also hear template being used as a way to describe how certain out-of-the-box components can be modified or overridden to create a custom experience. For example, you may be interested in adding a custom banner to a directory page. To do this, a developer would add a new banner template for you. When used this way, developers are using the official WordPress definition of template: any component in a WordPress theme that can be modified or overridden. In fact, the way we talk about templates during discovery fits this definition as well. In the WordPress development world, a Landing Page template is a template that modifies the page component, and a Profile template is a template that modifies the profiles component.

For most purposes, when you say you need a new template, the team will assume you mean a new page template, unless you specify the component’s name in front of it, such as a banner template.