Managing Community Templates

Managing Community Template

Saving an existing Aurea Social community as a SharePoint site template does not work properly as a means of creating new communities. Aurea Social instead provides its own means for creating templates for new Aurea Social communities.

To access this capability, to the following:

1. Go to NewsGator Social Platform Management page > Community and Spheres > Manage Community Templates. Manage Community Templates page is opened. With a community template, you can pre-define what lists and tabs will be a part of a new community, and in what order.



Configure the community templates

2. In the options section:
   • Check the All communities must use a template (only applies to new communities) checkbox to make it compulsory for all new communities to use a template.
   • Check the Allow communities to change templates checkbox to determine if a community admin can switch to a different template after the community is created.
3. Click the Create New Template link to open a screen. The first section is Name your template. Enter name and description of the template.



Name your template screen

4. In the Set template look and permissions section, choose a template and configure settings for the Overview tab (if your template has one).



Set template look and permissions section

5. In the bottom section you can control navigation links and specify what lists (and corresponding tabs if your template uses tabs) will be in the community to start. It also allows specifying features that are activated automatically when the community is created.
• Disable SharePoint Quick Launch: This simply enables or disables the SharePoint quick launch (left navigation). This is a property on the SPWeb and can be modified through other standard ways as well (that is, Site Settings > Tree View)
• Replace SharePoint Top Links with Community Tabs:
  • If on 2010 and using our NewsGatorSkin masterpage: When checked, this simply enables our tab control. When unchecked, the traditional SharePoint header navigation is restored and can be managed using the standard SharePoint navigation controls
  • If on 2013 or on 2010 and NOT using the NewsGatorSkin masterpage: When checked, the links in the traditional SharePoint header navigation are replaced with the links to the community tabs (still looks like SharePoint, just our community tabs are the links displayed instead of SharePoint’s). When unchecked, the header navigation links are managed by SharePoint.
6. To add a tab, select the type in the dropdown.



Select the type from the dropdown

7. Then select the appropriate secondary choices (such as list type if you picked a list) and click Save.



Select secondary choice

8. When you are done adding tabs and adjusting the order, click the Save Template button at the bottom of the screen.