First release of our template-website tool!

Taking the lessons learned from making our template-data-package, we’ve made a template for developing (and creating) websites, which we’ve officially released on GitHub and Zenodo :tada:

On August 8, 2025, we formally published the first release of one of our first “platform engineering” products to Zenodo. This product is a templating tool for creating websites, called template-website.

Platform engineering is the practice of building and maintaining internal developer platforms or products that improve the developer experience and productivity of the team or organisation. A big part of platform engineering is treating the development of these internal tools as if they are products of their own, where the developer is the client or user. It helps to ensure that these internal-facing products meet a certain level of quality, reliability, and usability.

In our case, because we develop and maintain many websites, both our own and also for collaborators, we spend a decent amount of time ensuring that changes across these websites are consistent and that our developer and build configurations are aligned. So, using the same tooling and processes we used to build our template-data-package, we built a template for making websites to help with developing these websites, managing configuration drift, and providing a scaffold to use when we create new websites.

If you want to learn more about what our template-website is and how to use it, check out its website. If you want to know more about what templating is, check out our previous blog post talking about template-data-package.

Can others use it?

While we built this tool for our own use, we also wanted to make it available for others to use. And with our focus on platform engineering, releasing the template-website as a formal product was an easy and natural step to make. With this template, we’ve aimed to have a balance between it being general enough to be useful in other contexts while also being opinionated enough to reflect our design principles. So yes, others can use it too! We hope you will, or at least draw some inspiration from it as we have from other templating tools ☺️ 🎉