Using templates

Why templates?

Our research shows that a lot of cities have similar problems that have solutions scattered across many agencies and nonprofits. StartHereCMS was created to make creating guides for your citizens as easy and cheap as possible.

Templates allow you to quickly create some pages using a simple heroku run command. Simply open the console in your app’s dashboard on Heroku and enter the template name you want:

How can I use a template?

The video above shows the basic steps, but here’s a play by play of what to do:

  1. Go to your Heroku app’s dashboard
  2. Open the console by clicking the “More” button followed by “Run console”
  3. A console window should appear at the bottom of the screen: enter the name of the template you want to use in the textbox
  4. Wait until you see the success message “Installed 163 object(s) from 1 fixture(s)”
    • The number of objects installed depends on the template you use
  5. Click open app to see your template successfully installed!
  6. Log into the admin interface to change/edit/remove/add to any of the newly created pages

How can I make a template?

Have an idea for a template that you think would be useful for other cities? Follow our guide to set up a local development environment and start designing your very own template to share.