The power of Smart Templates comes from the feature which allows you to include multiple page parts or excerpts from different sources
By default the add-on comes with 2 macros which can be used as excerpts, but this is extendable by you through add-on configuration via UPM (Go to Manage Add-ons and look for "Vertuna Smart Templates Plugin for Confluence" add-on)
Then click on "Configure"
This will bring up the configuration dialog and will show the macros currently supported as excerpts by Smart Templates in your Confluence installation
You can configure your own mappings here
Let's see what the existing mappings allows us to do.
Consider the following page
It contains 2 panels with some content
Now, we create a page with Smart Template macro and point it to this page as a source
Now, we can see a dropdown with some content excerpts we can use:
We choose the first one from the list
And as you can see on the right-hand side only a selected part has been rendered in the preview and will be included into the Live Template
You can have Live Templates within Live Templates to include multiple excerpts
Or you can teach the add-on in the configuration to accept Smart Templates macro or any other macro as a supported content excerpt
It is better to avoid configuring smart template a supported excerpt, as it may lead to a infinite recursion (we have methods to detect this, no worries). But it is much easier and simple to use the Smart Templates with other macros