April 04, 2017

When you start a new Sitecore project, chances are that you and your team are going to be creating a lot of new templates. If you've got a custom base template that a lot of your templates inherit from, it's repetitive to select your base template each time you create a new template. In this post I'll show you how to reduce that ceremony.

Navigate to \sitecore\shell\Applications\Templates\CreateTemplate in your Sitecore install. Open up CreateTemplate.xml in your favorite text editor as an administrator. Change the Value attribute on line 22 to your preferred base template ID:

<TreePicker ID="BaseTemplate" DataContext="CreateTemplatePicker" SelectOnly="True" Width="100%" GridPanel.Width="100%" Value="{1930BBEB-7805-471A-A3BE-4858AC7CF696}" AllowNone="true"/>

{1930BBEB-7805-471A-A3BE-4858AC7CF696} is the default value and points to /sitecore/templates/System/Templates/Standard template .

That's it! Hopefully this tip will save you some time on your projects. I've verified that it works in all versions of Sitecore from 8.0 Initial Release through 8.2 Update-3.

Let me know your thoughts in the comments.