Very good post; I had a different but closely related question I’m curious for your opinion.

When assigning a layout and sublayouts to a given data template, there are a few options:

1. Individual items
- There are serious maintainability issues with this option, as content authors would be required to select all of the layout details for individual content items, so I’d say this is a ‘bad practice’.

2. Data template
- Assigning the default layout and sublayouts on the data template allows individual items to inherit settings from the data template.
- One downside of this option is that if a content author needs to change the layout/sublayouts on an individual item, they need to “break” the inheritance, resetting the layout details defined at the data template level (though the ‘Copy To’ functionality on the Layout Details can make this easier).

3. Data template standard values
- Assigning the default layout/sublayouts on the data template’s standard values allows invidual items to inherit settings from the data template, but will automatically “break” the inheritance.
- This option has the benefit of already setting all of the layout details on individual items. On the other hand, this option could cause some maintainability issues because _all_ items will “break” inheritance from the parent template. One example is that it would be difficult to remove a sublayout from all items of a given data template type in this scenario.

So, what do you think? Is option 2 a ’95%’ best practice, where option 3 should be used for data templates that will most likely need to be reconfigured for each individual item?