How to use several beamer (slide) templates in one document?

Question

Maybe this is an obvious question, but I need some help defining slide templates.

I would like to make my own beamer template and have the option to use several slide templates in one document. One of the slide templates I would like to be a half coloured slide. To make such a slide, I use tikz, as explained here. Contrary to the post I linked, I don't want this to be the default slide, because I want to define several. Changing setbeamertemplate to defbeamertemplate does not work.

Am I right in thinking that "background canvas" is the name of this template? How do I choose for each beamer frame what template to use?

Answer 1

You can declare several defbeamertemplate and restict their use to only one or several frames enclosing them into {...}.

\documentclass{beamer}
\defbeamertemplate{background canvas}{vertical color}[1]
{
\color{#1}\rule{.5\paperwidth}{\paperheight}
}
\defbeamertemplate{background canvas}{horizontal color}[1]
{
\color{#1}\rule{\paperwidth}{.5\paperheight}
}
\begin{document}
\begin{frame}
test
\end{frame}
{\setbeamertemplate{background canvas}[vertical color]{red}
\begin{frame}
Not background
\end{frame}
}
{
\setbeamertemplate{background canvas}[horizontal color]{green}
\begin{frame}
test
\end{frame}
}
\end{document}