Template vs Blueprint

Dmitry Dm August 26, 2013

Can someone shed some light, please, on what the difference is between a page template (classic Confluence functionality) and a blueprint? Seems to be the same thing.

8 answers

11 votes
Prateek Bansal March 8, 2015

This is the difference based on my experience

Blueprint

Template

Title can be pre-populated For e.g. dynamic dates in minutes page

Title is Blank

UX Wrapper to pre-populate content dynamically in the page and have macros

No UX Wrapper, but can have pre-written/designed content and end user macros

Needs more development efforts

Needs less development effort. Faster to create.

Creates Index/Report page if Page Properties are included in the blueprint

Does not create any index

5 votes
Stephan Sutter January 14, 2016

Hi,

Our company is ISO9001:2015 certified and we started to use Confluence in 2013. We had the Vision to do all our documents within Confluence: contracts, offers, specifications, etc. But our customers still want Word documents and PDFs. So we had to find a way to get all your Word Templates into Confluence. With Confluence templates you can do only one page templates and that was a Show stopper. Blueprints can only be improved by a very small number of employees and that is not collaboration! So in the beginning we used the Plugin Copy Page Tree. It worked, but we were looking for a better way.

So we decided to write our own plugin called Page Tree Creator. The following table describes how we see the difference between the solutions.

If you want to see our Page Tree Creator in action, checkout our live examples under this link:


https://focuspro.eps.ch/display/PEPSMarktExample/Marketplace+Examples

 

Feature / FunctionPage Tree CreatorCopy Page TreeBlueprintsTemplate
Page Trees are supportedticktickminusminus
Search & Replace in Page Titletickticktickminus
Search & Replace in Page Contenttickminus

tick

minus

Search & Replace in Macro Parameterstickminusminusminus
Search & Replace in Label Fieldstickminusminusminus
Copy attachmentsticktickminusminus
Default Tags (variables, e.g. current user, template Version,...) tick minus tick tick 
No Programming Skills needed, so everybody can improve templatesticktickminustick
Create Index / Report page based on Page Propertiestickminustickminus

Button with source and destination link to create new Page / Page Tree

tickminustickminus
Cascade Creation of Multi-Page Treestickminusminusminus
No need of Administration Permisson for the design of Page Tree Templatesticktickminusminus
Page restrications are copiedticktickminusminus

Standard Confluence links behind Buttons: Renaming and rearrangement of template pages works like everywhere in Confluence

tickminusminusminus
Tag Markers can be configuredtickminusminusminus
Typed Input Fields (user picker is done, date, time, etc. will follow)( tick )minustickminus

Copy published Comala Pages

ticktickminusminus
Copy Page Tree without Search & Replaceticktickminusminus

Create Space and copy Page Tree: Use our plugin Space Tree Creator 

( tick )minusminusminus

Internationalization of Page Trees

tick, build Page Tree per languagetick, build Page Tree per languageminusminus
Internationalization of one Pagetick, build a Page per languagetick, build a Page per languageticktick

 

Regards,
Stephan

 

kobull June 12, 2017

This looks awesome. Thanks for making this. I was about to have to create this, or a version of it. Do you have developer documentation on how to use and extend this?

Charisma Riley November 19, 2019

@Stephan Sutter I love the concept behind your add-on! I noticed, however, that the Cloud version is quite distinctly nerfed compared to the Server versions. . . so according to the features you list above (which is way more complete/clear than the feature sets explained here, which ones apply to the state of the Cloud version today? What features does it currently have compared to the native Cloud template editor? (If I am going to make a recommendation to my group, I need to have this information.)

Thank you, in advance, sir!

2 votes
Brittany Walker July 2, 2014

One difference I have noticed is that with Blueprints, you can specify what you want the title of the page to be and add variables. Ex. if you create a page with the Meeting Notes blueprint, your page is automatically titled " Todaysdate Meeting Notes."

As far as I know, you can't do that with templates. When you create a new page from a template, you have to manually enter the name of the new page:

2 votes
Stefan Ernst August 26, 2013

templates are somewhat limited, with blueprints you can build a fully customizable wizard for your Jira pages. Look at what the polls plugin does with blueprints

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/com.simplenia.confluence.plugins.polls

1 vote
Charisma Riley November 19, 2019

Sorry to re-open an old thread, but I am still looking for this information, especially for Cloud. What are the differences between the Templates we can make with the Template Editor vs. Blueprints?

Malik Mangier December 6, 2019

"A blueprint is a page template with added functionality to help you create, manage and organize content in Confluence"; From https://confluence.atlassian.com/doc/page-templates-296093785.html , but that holds for Cloud as well.

I'd say start with Templates you can make with the Template Editor, if you run into any limitation in terms of customization/automation then start looking at blueprints

1 vote
Timothy
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August 26, 2013
Daniel Borcherding
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August 26, 2013

TLDR; A blueprint is a template with extra sugar.

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Dmitry Dm August 27, 2013

It says in the doc that "A blueprint is a page template with added functionality to help you create, manage and organise content in Confluence.". Can you, please, give an example of such functionality? So far I see a blueprint as just a large template that can include several simple page templates... Am I right?

0 votes
JRR January 20, 2015

Yes, concrete examples would help me understand that statement as well!

0 votes
LUC FILION June 3, 2014

Hello,

I invite you to look at the Gaia for JIRA plugin, which basically allow to create new spaces based on a template space. It has got several templates included, and it includes blueprints as well. This allows basically to have a broad set of Confluence pages, and blueprints. So anyone can start a new project based on an predefined environment. Pretty neat.

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