The web frontend is an acceptable tool for making configuration changes to a Zabbix server, unless you have to make lots of modifications, which aren't made easier in the frontend with methods such as mass update. One simple method is exporting configuration to an XML file, making some changes, and importing it back in.
XML import/export is very often used to share templates—you can find a large number of those on https://zabbix.org and http://share.zabbix.com.
We'll look at the Zabbix API a bit later. It's suggested to use the API to modify Zabbix configuration, as it also offers much more complete functionality than XML import/export—although the XML approach might be simpler in some cases.
Let's look at how a simple roundtrip would work.