denny
commented
9 years ago I think you're misunderstanding how the system works.
The idea at present is that a Template Admin (somebody with HTML skills such as yourself) creates the CMS Templates with the correct element stack, based on the .tt files, and then your 'normal' site users (Page Admin) only have to create CMS Pages using the existing CMS Template records, which will prepopulate the element stack for them appropriately.
Looking at your site (thanks for giving me the login details on IRC) it looks like you're not adding any elements to your CMS Template. That means every time you create a CMS Page, you have to add the elements manually. Add them to the CMS Template, then any new CMS Pages created using that CMS Template will get the right elements automatically.
wbraswell
When a user creates a new page, they must somehow already know the names of the template elements to add, and what kind of element to set each as: "Short Text", "Long Text", "HTML", or "Image".
Even for the "HTML Only" template I made, the ShinyCMS user must still know to add template elements named "page_heading" as "Short Text" and "page_body" as "HTML". Unless every template is somehow documented to tell users what elements to create, then the only way to actually know is to read the *.tt file source code, which is beyond the abilities of a normal user.
The desired behavior would automatically detect each element from within the .tt files, and properly populate the new Page with said elements. I don't know how to denote the kind of element ("Short Text", "HTML", etc) inside the .tt files, a comment or other Template Toolkit markup perhaps?