Creating SP2016 site templates with publishing feature enabled
May 8, 2017 11:32 AM   Subscribe

I am creating a new site collection to serve as a corporate intranet on the SP2016 foundation. I want to keep the Publishing Feature enabled, which disables the "save site as a template" option in site settings. Please take a look at my proposed approach below and let me know what I'm missing. If you suggest other solutions, please note that I am not a developer and nor can I hire one. THANKS!

For our portal sites, I want to design a handful of sites which will be reused as templates. There's nothing fancy here -- just particular web parts laid out in a particular way, like Summary links with headers I want standardized across all sites, a CQWB that pulls filtered data from lists, a site contact web part, a list of links that would be the same on all the sites.

I want the publishing feature enabled for all these sites. With that enabled, however, the "save site as a template" option is not allowed or supported. The most common workarounds I've found suggest that there are pitfalls and things can fail. (These warnings tend to be vague but you see them enough I'm convinced I want to avoid them.)

In my testing, though, I have successfully just gone to "Manage Content and Structure" and just used the COPY operation to copy one of these sites and paste that copy in a new location.

Are there any problems with this approach? If it works, I'm just going to create a site collection called "Site Types" or something like that, design each of my site types as a subsite there, and when I need to create a new one elsewhere in the site collection, perform this copy from Manage Content and Structure.

Any pitfalls with this? Thanks.
posted by Philemon to Computers & Internet (1 answer total)
 
The main pitfall is the copy will work to create children/sibling sites within the same parent site collection.

But, it will not copy across site collections.

That may not be an issue for you, as long as you plan to keep that site and its children approximately less than 100gb of content. (Although - if you are going to only ever backup/restore the site(s) via SQL database, you can grow as large as you need - but you cannot ever do a file-level backup/restore).

If this is for a non-profit - feel free to send me MeMail, I donate time for this type of SharePoint thing.
posted by jkaczor at 3:07 PM on May 8, 2017


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