Recommended practices

• The decision whether to keep your blueprints complex or simple, is a business question and has to be taken early. The question that helps defining what goes in your blueprint, or not, is “Are all my channels going to need this feature?”

• Try to keep your blueprint small by using site configuration inheritance.

• Decide early if content needs to be copied by the blueprint. This is a business decision, too.

• Keep sitemap and sitemenus out of the blueprint. There are only 2 sitemap items that usually need to be defined, these are the homepage and the errorpage. The only reason the homepage needs to be created from the blueprint is so that the generated channel can immediately be previewed.

• Do not create blueprints prematurely. First, make sure the business process of defining the type of the channel is complete. The more complete it is, the fewer changes will be needed on the existing blueprint later. Updating a blueprint is not trivial, once channels have been created off it.

• Use Channel manager event listeners if you need to perform additional actions after a channel was created from a blueprint. See Channel Manager Event Listener for more information.

• Use the Channel Parameters feature to store custom information on your channel. For example, a blueprint that creates channels for a specific country could store the country identifier in a channel parameter. This is also useful for implementing theming. See Define a Channel's Configuration Parameters for more information on adding custom channel parameters.