MORE Updates!

As promised, and with the SGIA approaching, some other tools have been released!

MORE GENERAL TEMPLATES TOOLS
In your admin panel, in TEMPLATES OPTIONS => Manage General Templates, several new tools has been added.
It will now be possible to do mass actions against templates as well as copying them into other categories.
This was needed to help organizing quickly and better all of them, especially when you have a lot of templates!

There's also a new field named "KEYWORDS".
Internally this field can be used to filter your templates amongst products. Previous to this if you had templates for both Christmas banners and Christmas buttons you would need to create separate template categories for each in order to display them related to that product. By filtering, you can place all Christmas templates in the same category. This will reduce the number of categories meaning fewer clicks for users.

MORE TEXT LABELS TOOLS
Similar to styles, it's now possible to import/export label sets to files.
As now we're working to add various missed texts to labels themselves, this feature will be the way to install language packs into RTD companies, to be used at stores level. Thinking at the US needs, we're finalizing now the Spanish pack. French will follow soon.
Going international!

EXTRA FUNCTIONS FOR THE BORDER TOOL
It is now possible to set all the default values for size borders.
This includes the default thickness, edge offset and corner radius. But also is you want the border to be visible since the very beginning and if users should see the "cut to shape" option or not

REVISED ADMIN COMMANDS IN DESIGNER
If you'll visit your designer while logged in as admin, the command box will no more be shown inline (ruining also your layout), but in a dedicated area on top of everything.
It's just a first step: this will be useful also in future, as it grants more space to add MORE admin commands, whenever they'll be needed.
One example you can already see is when you import orders for revisions: now everything about the original order will be placed on top as well, so all you'll need to do is just scrolling the page, instead of looking for hidden commands.
Probably after the trandeshow, in that area I'm also planning to make some better pages to manage and edit templates.

BTW, I 've also changed a little bit the same screen when it's the customer reopening an order for revisions: the command to save as well as isntructions will now be always visible. BTW2: Did I mention I've added also that text to the text labels?

THE BEST ONE - TEMPLATE CLONING!
Why the best one? Because we're working to create a new set of nice templates. Also, we're finalizing a method that will allow us to clone general templates between companies.
This means that we will be finally able to provide templates that can be used in your RTD! It will be an incredible help for any company still not using/having templates, because customers feel more comfortable in editing something rather that creating from scratch.

All good news and great updates. Love the admin commands change. This will help tremendously. When you get to making better pages there I'd suggest making the area as small as possible, but still functional. Screens, now a days, have plenty of space left to right and more limited space top to bottom.

Template cloning is a great thing. This is where we are falling behind the competition. Glad RTD is moving ahead here. Keywords is a great idea. I've been writing a suggestion about Product Templates to do the same sort of thing. Knowing that product templates are designed for a particular size and shape and might therefore be more limiting across products, an ability to clone them across products would save considerable time. Being able to name categories would also be tremendous. You might ask "why not just use general templates instead?" Because general templates take quite a bit longer to produce and the method for presenting them outside of the catalog is very different than product templates. At least that is how I see it. I could be wrong.

And, can never have enough text labels. Thank you for this fantastic update.

About the template considerations you made:
Considering their structure, cloning product templates will be nearly impossible. The main reason is because all product template data are not "open" as in general templates, but hardcoded into the template itself. This makes possible to use all of the product's features, but also forces to use the template exclusively with the product it was built with.

Now I'm already thinking at something about all of this, but there are a few key points I've already set.
1st, I'll try to move everyday more in the general templates directon: I would really love to be able to make product templates not needed. To do this (2nd), main things to verify are the exceptions in case unavailable effects are used in a template, and some support for multisided general templates (now only product tempaltes supports multisides properly).

And about how to display them, there's another big plan approaching.
The RTD catalog may be good if you don't have any website, but it's not really much friendly in reaching and displaying templates. Moreover, many companies may want to have ONLY the templates, to be integrated in websites.
Till now, a way to do so was to create template links and build a custom HTML page: but the drawbacks are obvious: 1st, you need to know how to code the page; 2nd, everything will be static and hardcoded, requiring editing everytime you change something.
So the plan is to make use of the API (I made them exactly for these kind of stuffs!). One of the new actions allows to grab RTD templates links and details. This means that it will be possible to build an API-based script that can simply become a template-display page.
Not only this will allow more flexibility in building such page's layout, being outside of the catalog's structure: it will also allow any company to easily install the script in their website to integrate such page transparently.

As you can see, the future combination of General Templates Cloning + API script to display them will allow us (and users) to quickly have templates as well as an immediate way of integrating into websites.

At the end, the creation of that API-template script one will be of the planned thing for after tradeshow. And not only, because I'd really like to start creating a lot of small API tools that could help a lot, in both integration and administration.

That's it, so far. Thanks for your comments on the new updates!

Now, I think that is the right direction - combining API and cloning. I like it. However,

Quote
Alex
Till now, a way to do so was to create template links and build a custom HTML page: but the drawbacks are obvious: 1st, you need to know how to code the page; 2nd, everything will be static and hardcoded, requiring editing everytime you change something.

there is a better way. Stripping down the catalog, if you aren't using much of it, and making iframes to product templates works perfectly and is super fast when building templates. Nothing to do. Ever. 1st, No link building. Just display the templates in the iframe. 2nd nothing is static and hardcoded. Make a new template and it appears. No changes necessary. One can easily design and add to templates and have displayed on ones own pages in under a minute. Doesn't get much simpler than that. But still, the API/Clone should be the way to go.

Thinking out loud a moment . . . A note about why Product templates are so fast to create. You've created various combinations of designs and added to the cart. Quickly making 10 to 20 designs is easy and fast. Once in the cart, it takes just seconds to hit "Save as Product Template" and it's done. With general templates the naming and choosing of categories is time consuming. Making choices about naming and storage conventions is tedious, but certainly having all the informations entered is best for long haul

As for catalog, also an API version will need no hardcoding: it will be like "extracting" the templates part of the catalog.
Using catalog as you suggest is possible, but requires a lot of CSS editing to show only what you need.
In any case, I'll annouce here when we will start working on that. Everything about integration is really exciting!

Product templates: that's a useful info for me.
As I will be in the process of changing general templates management, every real-world impression will help in planning the best solution. I will keep this note in mind when I'll face them.
I'd like to make a better flow for both saving and editing, that structure is really old (was last changed back in 2008!)

"Extracting" the templates part of the catalog. Brilliant. Simply brilliant.

"General Templates better flow for saving and editing". . . Pretty soon would like to move this topic and start a General discussion for brainstorm of ideas as this will be a huge improvement for RTD. Note to self added.