I think multiple parent categories along with the proposed private templates using the PM to yourself + tag would cover almost all of the use cases with templates.
Even with some of the examples I mentioned, it was hard to come up with a case where two+ users, and not a group, would need to share the same templates.
If two people wanted the same template, they could always just PM each other with the template and then turn that message into a template by copy + pasting the PM back to themselves, which would be a small extra step, but I can’t imagine this coming up very often.
I feel like Trust Levels could be a good way to restrict the use of private templates to only those who might need to use them. One of the issues I could see happening with private templates (and templates in general), is that if a user had access to them they could create a lot of “spam” on the site by posting the same thing over and over again, to the point that their account could need to be silenced or otherwise restricted if it got really bad. Templates in general also seem like more of an admin / moderator / super user type feature, rather than something everyone should have access to, and only allowing higher trust level users to use private templates would address this. ’
I’m imaging a setting in the Templates Plugin to allow “Trust Level X” or higher users to use private templates. Something like this, but for “Private Template Min Trust Level”.
My other thought here would be a checkbox setting somewhere in the group settings page for each trust level group to “allow private templates”, but having a single place to set this up would probably be preferred, instead of having to edit multiple group settings.
Defining the tag globally would be easier to setup from a site admin standpoint, and then somehow informing users that “this is the tag to use for private templates” to make this apparent. I feel like this might be able to work if a PM was shared between more than one user since the private template tag would be globally defined, and would still work in situations where the PM template is only shared with the user who created it. Although, I’m not sure what kind of implications this would have on checking if a user can use templates or not since everyone would be using the same private template tag with this design.
This is a great point, and something I hadn’t considered. Thinking about our workflow currently for tracking down where you need to go to edit a template - If I’m making a post with a template in it and I want to view the topic with the actual template, the easiest way I can think of would be to search the template name with the site search, and then jump to that topic. However, as far as I’m aware, you can’t search PMs with the site search, so this wouldn’t work with private templates.
Perhaps a button within the template selection area when you’re making a post could be helpful here? Something like:
It would definitely be nice for a user to have all templates available in one place, but I’m not sure what the best answer here is.
I’m curious to hear about what other thoughts there are about this.