The template builder is (sort of) portable

Tridion

The Tridion template builder is a great tool, but it can sometimes be tricky to install. SDL have chosen to distribute it through the ClickOnce mechanism (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ClickOnce). This does not work with Chrome out of the box, and I haven’t always had good results with the various ClickOnce Chrome extensions out there. Instead, I normally start up IE and point it to the CM site, click on the Tools ribbon and install the Template Builder from there.

There are times when even this approach does not work, for example if I’m working on some locked down machine. For these occasions it is good to know that the Template Builder is portable – or rather portable-ish.

Here’s what you do:

  1. Log in to a Tridion CM server and navigation to the Tridion CM root
  2. Copy the folder web\TemplateBuilder to your local machine (assuming you want to run the template builder there
  3. Remove the extension ‘.deploy’ from all files that have that extension
  4. Double-click on TcmTemplateBuilder.exe

That’s it! You can now zip that folder and use it wherever you want. Of course you mustn’t share it with ANYONE, because it is still commercial software.