hey it's Jason again good to be back uh today I'm going to walk through Basecamp templates so I posted a video yesterday walking through how to set up a base camp project and Charles here said how do you guys use Basecamp templates so I said good one I'll make that next so here we are let me switch over to Basecamp all right so um in Basecamp you can set up project templates which means you can set a project up you know and set up the to do set up messages set up all these different things and then reuse that over and over and over and over without having to recreate things from scratch every time so let me just walk you through how that works and I'll show you an example and uh it should be a pretty quick one but of a clear one so you click make a project and up here you'll see a link it says use a template now you click that link and it's going to give you a list of all the templates you've already created but since you can't see those you don't know what these are I'll walk you through what they look like so I'm going to click the edit templates link and um these are a bunch of templates that we have in our account some of these are just samples some of these are just demo things but I'll show you a real one so you can really get a look at this so whenever we hire a new programmer we create a project for that new programmer um or designer or anybody but I'm going to use the programmer as an example here so we hire a new program named Joe and Joe gets his own project when he starts and it's based on this template so I'm going to click on the template by the way you'll see templates real quick this is just a little thing um projects of course are these cards and templates um are these little kind of blue blueprint style cards so that just means that you're working within something that's a blueprint for something else all right so I'm going to click on the template and uh there's a little menu at the top or a little bubble it says you can edit this like any other template um so you can actually start a new project from this template right from here you can also do that elsewhere but let's get into the template itself again on a blueprint background so you know what you're working with here and in this case we have three tools that are populated and then two tools that are not so a template can have a project template can have content in a tool but it can also just have the tools that are set up that you might want to use for the project itself so we have a message board set up and ali um has an announcement to the person says welcome to 37 signals I'm not going to click on that but that's what that is so that's there then we have basically a long collection of to Do's for the person and for us so before you start is what the manager is going to do and it's what the person is going to do um or actually sorry not not the person this is people Ops is going to do and then day one here's the stuff that we need to do for you invite you to hey invite you to base camp all those things right week one hour tasks we've got these things these are called to do groups in Basecamp where you can create a group and then group to Do's underneath them and you can color code them and set these things up so it's you know really simple but also quite powerful um week one your tasks so here's the stuff that we're gonna do for you we need to set up all the stuff VPN get you set up on GitHub a Duo account for two-factor authentication all that stuff and then week one your tasks here's what we need from you that sort of thing and we just have a number of these right so those are all set up once and then they show up in the project when you create the project I'm going to go back by the way you'll see me to go back so Basecamp the interface is sort of based on sheets of paper so this is the frontmost sheet and the back just to go back one level you just click you can click on the link but you can also click anywhere in the back sheet is what we call it so just click over here we've got a single document in docs and files which contains um some basic stuff to start with and then a bunch of links to other things that you're going to want to know or want to join in base camp so some of these projects you're going to need to ask to be added to other ones you can just join but here's all the stuff especially if you're a programmer that you're going to want to join so we have all that in one place for you and some other things that are useful to know a glossary code of conduct all that kind of stuff a place to get some T-shirts if you want that sort of thing so all this is created once set up and um and then when you create a new project or when you when you hire a new person a programmer in this case you could just spin up this project and rename it so I'll show you how that works you can do it from here but also go back home I'll say make a new project use a template and we'll go back to here new programmer onboarding and I'll say um you know welcome Sally right um create and it's going to take a second so we have this little nice um sort of Searchlight graphic um and here it is so now since I created the project I didn't create the tempo but I created the project the stuff is from me so before I don't know if you remember but the template had a message from Ali but in this case I created it so it's from me but here's all those things ready to go and then of course I could just add Sally and add her here and then she would have access to the project as well so that's how templates work I hope that was helpful if you have any other questions just post them in the comments and I will try to respond thanks again for watching