Organizing templates - Template/Design Share - Forums

Chuck K

Registered: 10/20/19

Organizing templates Dec 26, 2019 6:16 PM

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I was wondering what conventions others use to name and organize templates. With multiple properties and some requiring very specific information necessitating separate templates, my library is growing. Before it gets much bigger, I would like to apply some "best practices" to it.

Ideas? Suggestions? Tip or hints?

Chris Hynes

Registered: 10/19/12

Re: Organizing templates Dec 29, 2019 7:37 AM

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We've got two standard suggestions for this:

1) When possible, use a single email template for multiple properties and then use custom fields to change up the parts of the email that are different. Often 90% of an email like a pre-arrival email is the same and there's just a bit different for each property like the name, directions, door code, etc. Here's an article on that: https://www.ownerreservations.com/support/articles/pre-arrival-email-templates-triggers-custom-fields

2) If you do need different templates, group similar ones together by a common prefix so that when alphabetically sorted they will show up together.

Anybody else have a good system they use for this?

Rich S

Registered: 12/28/18

Re: Organizing templates Dec 29, 2019 8:48 PM

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Chris Hynes said:

We've got two standard suggestions for this:

2) If you do need different templates, group similar ones together by a common prefix so that when alphabetically sorted they will show up together.

Anybody else have a good system they use for this?

I prefer starting all important email templates with a 3-character prefix:

- dot (period)
- letter (a, b, c, etc)
- digit (1,2,...)

This works because
a) a period is sorted before any letters, so your important templates are first
b) you can have .a1 and then .a2 and then .a3 so that multiple templates sent from the same trigger are sorted together
c) pretty easy to read at a glance
d) you can move templates around easily. Just change .a2 to .z1 and it's at the end of your list

I also use upper case ALERT in front of several of my templates that all naturally work together, so that's another approach for some templates, but the .a1 approach covers the majority of my active templates.