Custom Project Templates - Nextedy Documentation

What This Guide Covers

This guide walks through installing the bundled planningboard_template into Polarion’s project template registry, verifying the installation through the administration interface, and creating a new project from the installed template. It also covers the template’s structure so you understand what gets provisioned.

Prerequisites

Planningboard is installed and licensed on your Polarion instance.
You have administrator access to the Polarion server.
You have access to Administration > Nextedy PLANNINGBOARD in the Polarion admin interface.

Open the Planningboard Setup Page

Log in to Polarion as a system administrator.
Navigate to Administration > Nextedy PLANNINGBOARD.
Select the Setup tab.

The setup page displays the currently installed plugin version and a Template Installation section showing whether the demo template is already present.

If the status already shows the template as installed, skip to Step 3. Re-installing an already-present template is safe — the installation is transaction-wrapped and rolls back on failure — but it is unnecessary.

Install the Template

On the Setup page, locate the Install Demo Template button.
Click the button to trigger installation.

The server installs the template ZIP bundled with the plugin into Polarion’s template repository at .polarion/projects/templates/planningboard_template.The page reloads and shows a status message:

A message beginning with OK: confirms a successful installation.
Any other message indicates a failure — the installation is automatically rolled back (no partial state is left).

If you see an error message after clicking Install, check that the Polarion server process has write access to .polarion/projects/templates/. A permission error on the templates directory is a common cause of installation failure.

Template Installation Flow
--------------------------

  Plugin ZIP (bundled)
        |
        v
  Scan for template.properties files
  (each template.properties marks one template root)
        |
        v
  Upload each discovered template into
  .polarion/projects/templates/
  (wrapped in a Polarion transaction)
        |
       / \
      /   \
  Success  Failure
     |        |
  OK: msg  Rollback
             (no partial state)

The template ZIP may contain multiple project templates. All discovered templates (each identified by a template.properties file at its root) are installed in a single operation.

Create a Project from the Template

Once the template is installed it appears in Polarion’s standard New Project wizard.

Navigate to Administration > Projects > Create Project.
In the template picker, select planningboard_template (or the display name shown after installation).
Fill in your project ID, name, and other required fields.
Complete the wizard and wait for Polarion to provision the project.

The created project includes a pre-configured LiveReport page with the Planningboard widget already added, together with example Plans, swimlane configuration, and work item types that demonstrate the board’s capabilities out of the box.

The E-Library template that ships with Polarion also works well as a base for evaluating Planningboard. After creating an E-Library project, add a LiveReport page in the Planning space and insert the Plans - Planningboard widget. This gives you a working board without using the bundled template. See Setup into Existing Projects for the full walkthrough.

Verify the Installed Board

Open the newly created project in Polarion.
Navigate to Documents & Pages > Planning (or the space configured by the template).
Open the Planningboard LiveReport page.

The board should load and display the example Plans as columns and the example work items as cards distributed across swimlanes.

What to check	Expected result
Board renders without errors	Cards and column headers visible
Plans appear as columns	At least one column shown
Work items appear as cards	Cards populated in swimlanes
Capacity bars visible (if enabled)	Bar shown below each column header

Plan Name Pattern and Plan ID Pattern are pre-set for Teams. If your project does not use the Planningboard Teams feature, update these two widget parameters on the board page before creating your first new Plan from the board. Leaving them as-is when Teams are not configured causes new Plans to be created with unexpected IDs. See Widget Parameters Overview for the Plan Name Pattern and Plan ID Pattern fields.

Template Structure Reference

The installed template provisions the following configuration:

planningboard_template/
  template.properties          # Template identity (required — marks the template root)
  .polarion/
    polarion-project.xml       # Project metadata
    tracker/
      fields/                  # Work item type and field definitions
      workflow/                # Work item workflow
    pages/
      Planning/                # Planning space
        PlanningBoard/         # LiveReport page with the widget
  modules/
    Planning/                  # Example planning documents

The widget on the provisioned page has sensible defaults for plansMode, assignmentMode, query, lastPlans, and nextPlans. You can adjust all of these as widget parameters after the project is created.

Common Pitfalls

Whitespace in capacity configuration parameters. If you copy widget parameter values from the template and add or remove spaces around = signs, capacity calculations will silently fail. Capacity configuration parameters are whitespace-sensitive — copy them exactly.

Template visible but project creation fails. If the template appears in the wizard but the project fails to provision, verify that the Polarion server has sufficient disk space and that the templates repository is not locked by another operation.

You Should Now See

After completing this guide, the Planningboard demo template appears in Polarion’s project template picker, and any project created from it opens with a working Planningboard on its LiveReport page — Plans as columns, work items as cards in swimlanes, and the widget parameters pre-configured for immediate use.

​What This Guide Covers

​Prerequisites

​Template Structure Reference

​Common Pitfalls

​You Should Now See

​See Also

What This Guide Covers

Prerequisites

Template Structure Reference

Common Pitfalls

You Should Now See

See Also