Maybe I’m missing something, but it appears that it’s not possible to use a hidden template with a page created with the Pages module.

It works when I choose an unhidden template, but if I choose a hidden one it only displays a blank page. Is anyone else experiencing this? I would like to be able to have a template group full of hidden templates for pages to use.

I’m a bit confused, David. The entire point of hidden templates is that they can *not* be accessed directly.  So it makes sense that you can’t use it as a template for a Page. as that would be a direct access (as opposed to an Embed).

Okay, I could see how that would be considered direct access (url is mapped to a template). But I don’t want people to directly access my generic templates designed to be filled with content from my Pages weblog, because they would just see a complete listing of the contents of that weblog. But it might be handy (maybe not to others, who knows) if they could have a repository of templates. I still want the template itself to be hidden, but would like the ability to still use it for a Page.

It just seems that since you’re explicitly telling the Page to use the template that it would be okay.

Yes, that does make sense - but it doesn’t work that way at this point.  It would be just like trying to view a weblog entry via a template with a weblog entries tag, where that template was hidden.  It wouldn’t work even though there’s an “alias” to it.

If you’d like to post this in the feature request forum, that would probably be your best bet.  Depending on your Page URL, you could also test segments to know if the page should be displayed or not.

As a note, Derek pointed out to me (and I should have known too but I was not looking at the end result as much as I should have) - you can create a template and use a variety of parameters to ensure that the proper content is shown.  limit=“1”, show_pages=“only”, and require_entry=“yes”

I hope that helps!

Thanks for the help, Lisa. It was more of a curiosity thing for me, but if anyone else deems this a handy feature, I’ll put in a feature request for it.