Templates & Cloning

Plan requirements

Both templates and cloning are available on the Team plan and above. Organizations on the Free plan will see these features locked. Upgrade from your organization billing settings to enable them.

Creating and applying a project still counts against your plan's project limit. A Team plan allows up to 10 active projects; Business and Enterprise have no project cap.

Project cloning

Cloning creates a complete, independent copy of an existing project. The clone is a new project with its own URL slug and its own change history — edits to the clone do not affect the original, and vice versa.

How to clone

On the Projects page, hover over any project card and click the copy icon in the bottom-right corner. A dialog opens where you can set the new project's name and URL slug. Click Clone project to start the copy.

Cloning requires the entry:create permission, which means any Member, Admin, or Owner can clone.

What gets cloned

• All active entries — content types, taxonomy vocabularies, media types, paragraph types, views, menus, roles, and every other entity type in the project, including their fields and nested children.
• Project-scoped registry entries — any custom field types, widgets, or formatters you added to the project's registry are copied so the clone's entries validate correctly. Globally-seeded registry rows are shared by all projects automatically and are not duplicated.
• Module registry — contributed and custom modules installed in the source project are copied to the clone.
• Custom tab types — any entity types added to the project beyond the built-in set (e.g. a community entity type) are duplicated as independent copies in the clone.
• Tab configuration — tab labels, visibility, and sort order are preserved.
• Project settings — Drupal version, description, and project-level settings (approval workflow, field-prefix requirement, minimum stability) carry over.

What does not get cloned

• Change history — the clone starts with a clean change log. Committed changesets and change events from the source project are not carried over.
• Archived or deleted entries — only active entries are included in the clone.
• Project guests — guest invitations are project-specific and are not transferred.
• Comments — any comments on entries in the source project are not copied.

Templates

Templates are organization-level snapshots of a project's content architecture. Unlike cloning (which copies everything into a new project), a template stores the architecture as a reusable blueprint that can be applied to any project — new or existing.

Saving a project as a template

Open the source project's Settings page and find the Save as template section. Give the template a name and optional description, then click Save template. The template captures:

• All active entries (content types, fields, vocabularies, etc.)
• Custom tab types and tab configuration
• Project-scoped registry entries (custom field types, widgets, formatters)
• Module dependencies (contributed and custom modules)
• The project's Drupal version

Creating a template requires the Admin or Owner role (org:templates permission).

Applying a template to a new project

When creating a new project, the Start from template dropdown lists all templates in your organization. Select one and the new project will be populated with the template's entries, registry additions, and module dependencies after creation.

If you select a template, the “Common Drupal defaults” start mode is overridden — the template's content replaces the defaults.

Applying a template requires at least the Member role (entry:create permission). The template is applied atomically: if any entry fails validation against the target project's registry, the entire apply is rolled back and an error is reported.

Applying a template to an existing project

Templates can also be applied to projects that already have content. The template's entries are added to the project — existing entries are not removed or overwritten. Registry entries and modules use an upsert strategy: if a machine name already exists, its metadata is updated; otherwise it is created.

All entries created by the apply are tracked in the project's draft changeset, so they appear in the change log and can be reviewed, approved, or reverted like any other edit.

Managing templates

All organization templates are listed at Templates in the organization sidebar. Admins and Owners can delete templates from this page. Deleting a template does not affect projects that were previously created from it.

Cloning vs. templates

Both features let you reuse an existing architecture, but they serve different workflows:

Use cases

Starting from a proven architecture

If your agency has a standard content model that most client sites share — Article, Landing Page, Media types, common vocabularies — save it as a template. Every new project starts with the vetted structure instead of rebuilding from scratch.

Spinning up client projects

Clone a reference project to give each client an independent copy that can diverge freely. The clone inherits the full content model, registry customizations, and module list, so the client project is immediately ready for customization without manual setup.

Versioned architecture snapshots

Templates are versioned (each carries a version string). You can create multiple templates from the same project at different stages to preserve point-in-time snapshots of your architecture for reference or rollback.

Augmenting an existing project

Apply a template to a project that is already in progress to layer in a standard set of entity types. For example, apply a “Media Kit” template to add pre-configured media types, image styles, and related fields to a project that was originally started empty.

Next steps

• Learn about Content Architecture for the full set of entity types and fields
• See Change Tracking to understand how template-applied entries appear in the change log
• Review Billing & Plans for plan limits and upgrade options
• Read Team Collaboration for roles and permissions