For Enterprise users, the ability to modify Field Templates is a great feature for those with HTML and CSS skills. We are making some changes to improve the manageability of customized field templates. This article describes those changes and the reasoning behind them.
Field Templates are fragments of HTML that control how an Interface displays a given field. The "Title" field settings shown above show a user-managed template is in use as indicated by the "User..." in the selected template name.
These Custom Field Templates are made available to and shared with other Interfaces in your account. The benefit of sharing one Field Template between multiple Interfaces is to avoid duplication of effort when creating an extensively customized Field Template.
This sharing feature has introduced a few challenges:
As the number of users managing Interfaces in a single account increases, understanding what Field Template is safe to edit becomes difficult.
Users get confused regarding how to make a new template, v.s. editing an existing template and then accidentally overwriting changes.
When Interface settings are imported and exported, the HTML customizations in these Custom Field Templates are not included, leading to an incomplete archive in the exported file.
These factors combined have led us to re-think how Custom Field Templates are managed.
Going forward, the following changes to the Field Templates will be introduced:
Customized templates will be localized to the Interface by default, meaning no changes to those Field Templates will impact other Interfaces. Shared setting values, including custom Field Templates, can still be managed via a locked setting in an Interface Template.
The Template drop-down list will show only either one of the standard, unmodified Field Templates, or "Customized", indicating that the template has been customized.
Users will no longer need to manage multiple versions of customized Field Templates in this drop-down list. Only "Customized" will be shown if one of the standard Field Templates was modified.
Users still seeking to create Shared Field Templates can check the "Shared Template" box in the Template Editor to access the old functionality.
No action is required from our users related to this change. Existing customizations to Field Templates will be preserved and available just as they were prior to this change.