Basecamp introduced Project Templates at the start of this month. Project Templates are a great way to organize project plans and follow set processes. If your projects have similar execution plan, you can create a template project in Basecamp, define milestones, todo lists and tasks, create messages and even set due dates on milestones. This was a long pending demand from many Basecamp users and can really cut down project plan creation time if you do a lot of similar projects.

Today, we added support to manage template projects from PlannerX. You can now create full outline of your standard project plan using the friendly and efficient PlannerX interface. Save it back and use that Template Project to create new projects in Basecamp. You get best of both worlds – super quick plan setup for both template project and new projects.

The integration is not yet perfect – milestone due dates may not work as expected, Basecamp does not support due dates on todos in template projects, and you can only assign items to people in the owner company in template projects. But it’s still a big step forward!

Tip: Make it even faster! Use PlannerX bookmarklet to open template project’s plan with PlannerX right within Basecamp.

A big thanks to Tzvi Kaufman for suggesting this idea.

PlannerX is our Basecamp add on that lets you manage your entire project plan using an outline, card and Gantt view. It makes planning projects 5X faster and is loved by hundreds of users!