Those paying careful attention to their ‘Manage Space’ pages on Wikispaces might have noticed a new link lately, ‘Manage Templates’. This link is the gateway to a new feature we’ve gotten a lot of requests for, page templates.

A page template lets you pre-fill the content of a newly created page with an existing page. Let’s take an example from a personal wiki and build a new template for travel planning.

First, click on ‘Manage Space’ in your Wikispace and then ‘Manage Templates’. Here you’ll see a list of existing templates and the option to create a new template. We’ll create one called ‘travel plan’:

After we click ‘Create Template’, we’re sent to the editor to add the content of our template. Like any wiki page, your templates can always be edited later. We’ll add in some common information on this page and save it:

Now when we click on ‘Make a New Page’ in our wiki, we have a new drop-down listing the templates we can start from. We’ll create a ‘Paris 2007′ page (wishful thinking here, but you get the idea…) based on our new travel plan layout:

Click create and the new trip page is filled in with our template:

Of course, page templates support everything that you can already put in Wikispaces pages, so you can add images, embedded media, even include other pages. Enjoy!