Monday, July 28, 2008

Create a Site Template from a Publishing Site


So you finally designed a perfect publishing site. You have it just the way you want it and you want to make sure that everyone uses this template to create sub sites that look just as good. Excellent! Now just save that site as a template and….what’s that? No “Save site as template” option? Uh oh. Unfortunately, MOSS does not support saving publishing sites as templates.

Never fear! There is a workaround! Simply turn off the publishing site features and you will have the ability to save your publishing site as a template.

The steps are as follows:
  • Create your publishing site and configure it the way you like.
  • Go to Site Actions à Site Settings à Modify all site settings
  • Under Site Administration, select “Site Features”
  • The status of “Office SharePoint Server Publishing” will be set to Active
  • Click Deactivate

Now your Site settings will show a “Save site as template” option.

Save your site template and then simply reverse the process to turn your publishing features back on.

Please note that publishing features will not be active on any site you create from this type of template. If you want to use them, you will need to turn them on as your sites are created.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Just want to mention that I read (somewhere) that the reason that publishing sites can't be saved as a template is because there is some bug or low level problem with the feature. So, MSFT disabled it. This trick enables the template feature, but it may be hiding a problem with sites saved that way.

As always, test this sort of thing carefully. It may work, but it may not.

doctator said...

Yep, there's a blog from Stefan Gossner stating that saving publishing enabled sites as a template is not supported.

Anonymous said...

Instead of going to this trouble, just navigate to the site that you want to save a template of and append this URL to the end:

/_Layouts/AreaTemplateSettings.aspx

Tripwire said...

jeffrey peters said it all in his previous post (beat me to it!).

You don't have to waste time with disabling and re-enabling publishing features. Just append the base site URL with the suffix he provided.

The advantage here is that the site is also created with publishing features by default.

As for problems, well, if only they'd been documented somewhere we might be able to check for them. I haven't run into any yet though.

wintert said...

I've tried it with browsing to /_layouts/savetmpl.aspx and savinf the Site as template and then creating a site from that template and it works great.

Anonymous said...

You can backup and restore - that's way easier than messing around with sharepoint's endless menus/links for administration .... just run stsadmin and off ya go.

Anonymous said...

Ver good
Its funny how a simple blog like this can answer the most important sharepoint problems!

Cheers to the contributors!

Unknown said...

Great info on the publsihing site tmeplate. However, is there a method for saving a site collection as a template?

Cheers In Advance