pre-populate template content

hi, I’m a newbie to WordPress theme dev – just beginning to realize the state of transition the product is in -namely to full editing /blocks etc.
I’m developing a theme and want to pre-set a couple of page layouts – whereby a user selects a template and the content is pre-populated with certain blocks with default content ready for their editing. I thought I would do this with page ‘templates’ selection – but realizing this is simply a tag for front-end rendering –
and separate from the_content.
I’m looking into block patterns and blocks, custom blocks as plugins, ‘default_content’ etc – but I’m not sure how to proceed with achieving my aim.
ideally, I would like a user to select a page template and be given content with some block patterns already present that they can then edit.
could do something with ‘default_content’ but then only conditional on post_type – so I can’t distinguish pages. Is this something that block templates will address?
any advice – best way to proceed?
thanks

• This topic was modified 3 years, 3 months ago by Jan Dembowski.