When working with content in a content area in Optimizely Content Management System (CMS 11), editors often like to specifically choose how the content should be laid out, which means choosing which rendering template should be used to display each item. Display options let developers specify which render templates are available for selection in the user interface.

## Configure display options

You can make rendering templates available for selection in the user interface by adding a `EPiServer.Web.DisplayOption` to the `DisplayOptions` options class, which you can configure on `IServiceCollection` as in example below:

See the `EPiServer.Web.DisplayOptions` class for information and method overloads.

Display options are registered during initialization through an initialization module.

Example: Display options initialization on the CMS sample site.

## Appearance in the user interface

Adding display options to the site automatically enables an additional option in the context menu for content within a content area. The example below is from the CMS sample site. The **Automatic** option is selected by default, which means that the content is using the rendering template specified by the content area. Selecting a display option other than Automatic renders that particular content in that content area using the rendering template associated with the display option.

Because display options are available in the context menu, you can select an option where the tag does not match a rendering template for the given content. In that case, a message is rendered instead of the content, which informs you that the content cannot be displayed with this chosen display option.