Websites aim to remain appealing to visitors by keeping their design and functionality modern and up to date. To support this, content creation often emphasizes the latest features, backed by newly developed component templates. As new innovations emerge, earlier features tend to lose relevance and gradually fall out of use.

This ongoing evolution often leads to a buildup of outdated content and templates that, while no longer relevant, still consume resources within the Magnolia instance. For those responsible for managing the CMS, it can be challenging to get a clear overview of what’s still in use and what can be safely cleaned up.

The Template Lifecycle Management (Template LM) extension is designed to assist with this challenge. It helps assess the relevance of content and templates and provides a structured process for phasing out and removing outdated elements from the system in a controlled manner.

Template LM offers the following key features:

Usage Analysis

• Lists all available template definitions in the Magnolia author instance

• Provides detailed insights into where and how often templates are used across pages

• Highlights broken template references to help identify and clean up dead content

• Supports exporting comprehensive template usage reports

Lifecycle Management

• Enables organizing templates into a custom folder structure

• Allows assigning lifecycle states to templates (e.g., experimental, operational, deprecated, end-of-life)

• Displays the current lifecycle state to authors during page or component creation

• Lets you exclude specific templates from the authoring interface to prevent new content from being created with outdated templates

The "Sync Content" action captures all existing template definitions and lists them in a separate workspace. From there, users can organize templates into folders and enrich them with lifecycle metadata such as state, comments, and exclusion flags. The content sync process also records template usage across all pages, displaying instance counts in the main browser and allowing users to drill down into individual template references.