Will Primary and Secondary Pages Require Different Templates?

Primary and secondary pages can both use the same page templates. However, since secondary pages are the only pages that can have dynamically placed content, you should consider the effect on how you view your page templates (and even your placeholders and placeholder definitions) with respect to the advantages of dynamically placed content.

A secondary page serves as the backdrop for content added to the site by a contributor. Secondary pages are required if you allow contributors to add contributor data files or native documents (both of which amount to new web pages) to the Web site. These files are made available to the site when they are picked up by a dynamic list, a search, or the target of a link.

It may be that you first build your site with just primary pages, saving secondary pages until after you set up contribution regions on the primary pages and know exactly what type of content contributors submit to the site. Then, you could add the secondary pages to handle this content.

Regardless of whether you use the same or different page templates for the primary and secondary pages in your Web site, it is important that you name the page templates appropriately. This is the same for all other site assets in Site Studio.

Consider the example shown in Figure:

Hierarchy Showing a Poorly Named Template

The same page template was used for both the primary and secondary pages. The page template name was based on where the template was based on initial placement, and when the site was expanded the reuse of the page template created a confusing arrangement.

The most efficient naming of site assets, including page templates, should be based on how the page template is used. Naming conventions based on where the asset is used in a Web site (for instance, "page_template_primarypage") or based on in the order of creation (for instance "pagetemplate3") can make the assets harder to manage.