Working with Baseline Projects (Template Projects)

dominKnow | ONE has a wide range of Project designs to help client teams get started.

Most organizations, though, have unique branding and look-and-feel standards. And most authoring teams need to create their own designs to match those standards.

This is where Baselines come in handy.

Baseline Projects are: 

• Shown in the From Baseline options on the Create New Project panel, so any of your authors can use it to start a new Project
• Also available as a filtered search on the Add a New Page panel as authors work in a Project
• And also available as a filtered search on the Add to Your Page panel so you can find Baseline Pages to add as Layers to any Claro Page or Sections to any a Flow Page

The functional answer to this question is simple: you only need to check a setting on the Project Properties panel.

An Administrator can set any Project to be a Baseline. (Authors don’t have this permission.)

This article outlines how to access the Project Properties panel and set the Is a Baseline setting.

Create a Baseline Project >>

Once the Project is set as a Baseline it will appear in the Baselines list on the Create New Project panel and can be used to start new Projects by anyone on your authoring team. 

So, making a Baseline is easy from a functional perspective.

What can be a little more involved is deciding on what you want to use as a Baseline. 

A Baseline is flexible enough that your team can take advantage of it in whatever way makes the most sense for how you work.

Here are a couple of use case examples.

A Baseline can be a full-Project template that your authors use to create new Projects.

The Baseline can contain the standard Project structure you use such as:

• Standard LOs and pages for Course Introduction
• Standard LOs and their pages for common content lesson types
• Standard LO and pages for Course Conclusion

The Baseline can be set to your own custom Theme and set up with standard:

• Project Metadata such as copyright or disclaimer text
• Master Pages for footers and headers
• Saved Project Layers or Sections
• Project Styles
• Publishing Profile
• and more

And all of these will be in place when the author uses the Baseline to create a new Project.

A Baseline can also function as a template library to store all the custom pages or Learning Objects your team makes. 

This way, your team always knows where to find them when adding pages to new Projects. 

And you can organize the Baseline to make things easy to find, by using LOs as categories for common types of Pages.

You might not use this Baseline to start new Projects since this would copy in every page in the Baseline into the new Project. 

But as your authors work in a Project, they can use the From a Baseline option available from the Add a Page panel or the Copy option on the Home tab to add any of the pages from this Baseline. 

You can also add a Baseline page as a Layer in a Claro page or a Section in a Flow page by using the Add To Your Page panel’s Search filter for Baselines.

Lorem Ipsum Text 

dominKnow | ONE’s built-in lorem ipsum text generator is great for adding placeholder text into template pages. 

Learning Object “Do Not Publish” Setting

On the Learning Object Properties panel’s Settings tab you can set the LO's status as Do not publish. 

In a Baseline, you can create an LO with instruction and informational pages explaining how to use the Baseline and set its status to Do Not Publish, and not worry that an author might forget to delete this content before publishing. 

The Do Not Publish setting also keeps the LO out of Full Project Previews and Project Reviews.

Set Baseline Status as Locked to Control Editing

You can set the Baseline’s status to be Locked/Read Only on its Project Properties.

It will still be available to use in all the ways a Baseline can be used. But the Locked status can help prevent it from being accidentally edited. 

NOTE: In Order to set the status as Locked all LOs must be checked in either by Committing each page individually or using the Allow Others to Edit feature available on the Project Outline’s three-dot menu.