Recommended Practices for Blueprints

• Determine the complexity of your blueprints early in the project. Decide whether to include a feature in your blueprint by asking: “Will all channels require this feature?” This is a business decision that should be made at the start of the project.
• Minimize blueprint size by leveraging site configuration inheritance. Use inheritance to share configuration across channels instead of duplicating it in the blueprint.
• Decide at the outset whether the blueprint should copy content. This is also a business decision and should be addressed before blueprint creation.
• Exclude sitemap and sitemenus from the blueprint whenever possible. Typically, only the homepage and error page need to be defined in the blueprint. The homepage is required so the generated channel can be previewed immediately after creation.
• Avoid creating blueprints before the channel type and business requirements are fully defined. Making changes to a blueprint after channels have been created from it is complex and may require significant effort.
• Use Experience Manager event listeners to perform additional actions after a channel is created from a blueprint. For implementation details, see Experience Manager Event Listener.
• Store custom information for your channel using the Channel Parameters feature. For example, if your blueprint creates channels for specific countries, store the country identifier as a channel parameter. Channel parameters are also useful for theming. For instructions on adding custom channel parameters, see Define a Channel's Configuration Parameters.