Portal Templates
Start from a finished portal design instead of building views one at a time.
What a template is
A template is a complete client-facing portal design - its views, layouts, welcome copy, look, colors, and background. Templates do not create anything in Notion and do not come with their own data. You keep the databases you already have; the template decides how they are presented to clients.
Browse the gallery at portalize.app/templates. Signed in, you can also reach it from Templates in the dashboard. Each card shows the template's category, a short description, and the sections it includes; opening one lists every section, marks the optional ones, and shows who the template is best for.
Installing a template
Choosing Use this template opens a three-step wizard:
Connect
Authorize your Notion workspace if you have not already. Share every database the template needs when Notion asks which pages to grant access to.
Adapt
The template lists the roles it needs - Campaigns, Deliverables, Reports, and so on. Portalize proposes a database for each role from your workspace and you confirm or change it. Required roles must be mapped; optional roles can be skipped. Each mapped role still needs scoping so clients only see their own rows, and your Clients database must be mapped before you can continue.
Preview
See the portal rendered before anyone else does, personalized with your own data where it could be: sections that are mapped and responding show a few of your real rows, and the rest fall back to the template's sample rows. Publish when it looks right.
Branding is applied as soon as you start: the wizard always applies to the portal you are currently on - it never creates a new one - and the template's look, primary color, background image, and welcome and contact copy are written to that portal straight away, before Adapt, before Preview, and whether or not you ever publish. That includes a live portal your clients can already see. Backing out of the wizard does not put your old branding back. The look, color, and background image you can set again yourself on the Branding tab, but the welcome and contact copy the template wrote stays - so start the wizard from a portal you are willing to change. Your brand name and your logo are left alone.
What publishing changes
Publishing turns the roles you mapped into real views on the portal, with the template's titles, layouts, fields, and scoping. It is the point at which clients can reach them. Branding is not part of this step - it was already applied when the wizard started.
One template per portal: publishing a template replaces any template you published to that portal before. The previous template's views are removed. Views you created yourself outside a template are not touched.
Before you can publish
The wizard blocks publishing until everything a client-safe portal needs is in place:
- Your Notion workspace is connected
- Your Clients database is mapped, with the Email and Name properties identified - see Notion Workspace Setup
- Every required role points at a database
- Every mapped role has scoping configured
Roles that still need attention are flagged in the Adapt step, and the rest stay collapsed so you only deal with what is missing.
Templates and plans
Templates work on every plan, including Free. Template views always publish read-only: clients can read the rows but not change them, on every plan. If you want a field clients can edit, open the view in the view editor afterwards and mark it editable there, which needs Starter or above - see Editable Fields. For the rest of what each plan includes, see Plans and limits.