Just dropping in here to lend my voice to this! Being able to apply a template to a blank page that already exists - or even being able to make a new tab and then apply a template to that - would be incredibly useful!

Since LK saves in real-time, a version history might be tricky and a little unreliable, even if it only updates x-often - especially if you have multiple editors. (I’m only guessing on that.)

Perhaps this feature could, instead, duplicate the tab and then apply the new template (instead of duplicating the article and potentially messing up existing links). That would keep the original content intact (like a savestate/version history), especially in case some things didn’t reformat well. Letting the editor choose if they want this new tab to be the default/first or not would be good, too - if nothing else, to make it easier to copy/paste old data into the new template on the desired page. This could also hep mitigate potential mistakes, such as another editor accidentally messing something up.

Another idea, which could also include the above, would be an inline reformat option, which gives you a live preview of the changes (like the split-screen article preview from a map).

Either way may require some looking-through some individual articles, but would still be much faster than hand-changing everything.

If different elements of a template could be auto-indexed behind the scenes (like auto-applying “template_[template name]_layout_box_1” or “callout 4b” or the like), then perhaps a batch-reformat might be possible in a similar way to how in google sheets, when you edit something such as dropdown lists, it asks you if you want to “apply only to this item” or “update all in series” - simply referencing and changing the chosen element(s). That could make it easier to keep the data by formatting only the elements (such as changing a callout type from “note” to “info”), though it would not help if you’ve added, say “jewelry” to a list inside a table/callout box - though maybe it could be add additional elements if it otherwise matches (such as if the article has “table_1” with only 4 rows, and the new template’s table has 5 but is otherwise the same, it could simple add rows to match).

I tweak templates very often in ways that aren’t total format changes, but simply callout types or layout styles, so being able to maintain data while updating things like that would be absolutely fantastic.

Just a button on articles to reset them to the new element page would be really handy for maintaining links to a page when you need to change a big part of it.

This is something that would mean a lot to me as well.

In a perfect world I could merge the old content with the new layout. But that sounds hard and error prone. Nuking the old content and leaving a shiny blank element from the template (of course, preserving all of those backlinks from other pages) would still be amazing.

I absolutely agree, there could also be option to apply (update) sidebar only to selected pages from template.

I sometimes use static sidebars with stuff like backlinking and list of useful link I want to have on multiple pages, option to update/apply template (yes, with overwriting existing content) and optionally only applying/updating sidebar is much needed

I'd even accept this feature if I'd get a warning that all content will be lost.

This would be especially useful in early world building, where the author might be creating multiple new pages for locations and NPCs.

And after some time... new idea for the template is born. That'd require updating 10,50,100 pages that have no content.

I'd go a step further, and allow for applying sidebar templates only when chosen, I have tons of pages where sidebars don't have any unique content, and update to the sidebar alone would be massive!