Introduction
In Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services, either a site definition or a custom site template defines how to instantiate a Web site when an end user creates a site through the user interface (UI). A definition or template determines, for example, the lists, files, Web Parts, Features, or settings with which to provision a new SharePoint site.
MOSS 2007 Site templates:
MOSS 2007 Site templates we have four categories of templates1) Collaboration2) Meetings3) Enterprise4) Publishing
Collaboration
Team Site: A site for teams to quickly organize, author, and share information. It provides a document library, and lists for managing announcements, calendar items, tasks, and discussions. Blank Site: A blank site for you to customize based on your requirements. Document Workspace: A site for colleagues to work together on a document. It provides a document library for storing the primary document and supporting files, a tasks list for assigning to-do items, and a links list for resources related to the document. Wiki Site: A site for a community to brainstorm and share ideas. It provides Web pages that can be quickly edited to record information and then linked together through keywordsBlog: A site for a person or team to post ideas, observations, and expertise that site visitors can comment on.
Meetings
Basic Meeting Workspace: A site to plan, organize, and capture the results of a meeting. It provides lists for managing the agenda, meeting attendees, and documents.Blank Meeting Workspace: A blank meeting site for you to customize based on your requirements.Decision Meeting Workspace: A site for meetings that track status or make decisions. It provides lists for creating tasks, storing documents, and recording decisions.Social Meeting Workspace: A site to plan social occasions. It provides lists for tracking attendees, providing directions, and storing pictures of the event.Multi Page Meeting Workspace: A site to plan, organize, and capture the results of a meeting. It provides lists for managing the agenda and meeting attendees in addition to two blank pages for you to customize based on your requirements.
Enterprise
Document Center: A site to centrally manage documents in your enterprise.Records Center: This template creates a site designed for records management. Records managers can configure the routing table to direct incoming files to specific locations. The site prevents records from being modified after they are added to the repository.Site Directory: A site for listing and categorizing important sites in your organization. It includes different views for categorized sites, top sites, and a site map.Report Center: A site for creating, managing, and delivering Web pages, dashboards, and key performance indicators that communicate metrics, goals, and business intelligence information.Search Center With Tabs: A site for delivering the search experience. The welcome page includes a search box with two tabs: one for general searches, and another for searches for information about people. You can add and customize tabs to focus on other search scopes or result types. My Site Host: A site used for hosting personal sites (My Sites) and the public People Profile page. This template needs to be provisioned only once per Shared Service Provider, please consult the documentation for details.Search Center: A site for delivering the search experience. The site includes pages for search results and advanced searches.
Publishing
Collaboration Portal: A starter site hierarchy for an intranet divisional portal. It includes a home page, a News site, a Site Directory, a Document Center, and a Search Center with Tabs. Typically, this site has nearly as many contributors as readers and is used to host team sites.Publishing Portal: A starter site hierarchy for an Internet-facing site or a large intranet portal. This site can be customized easily with distinctive branding. It includes a home page, a sample press releases subsite, a Search Center, and a login page. Typically, this site has many more readers than contributors, and it is used to publish Web pages with approval workflows.
Summary
In Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, a site definition still consists of a set of XML files located on front-end Web servers, which can be applied to provision new sites, and a site template (.STP) file can also still be applied to provision new sites as done previously. A site template, created through the user interface or through implementation of the object model, is a package containing a set of differences and changes from a base site definition. The site template package is stored as a CAB-based file that can be downloaded or uploaded to site collections by users with the appropriate rights. As before, site templates offer a measure of portability to SharePoint applications.
MOSS 2007 - Save site as a template missing
Add this à
/_layouts/savetmpl.aspx ->and then you would be able to save the site as a template.
SharePoint 2007 - Saving site templates
By navigating the SharePoint 2007 Site Settings options, it would appear that you can only save top level sites (in a site collection) as a template. "Save site as template" is found under the heading of "Look and Feel" on the Site Settings page.
Site Templates vs. Site Definitions
Site Templates are a LOT easier to create than Site Definitions. You can create a site template using point and click. Creating a site definition requires hand-coding a lot of XML files and other supporting files.
Site templates serve a customized version of pages, i.e. low performance. Site definitions serve uncustomized pages, i.e. high performance. Thus you should choose site definitions over site templates, if a large number of sites will be created based on this cookie cutter.
It is fairly easy to move around a site template. It is a tad bit (but not horribly more) complex to move around site definitions.
How to register a site template inside a site?
This can be done by uploading an existing site template to the site template gallery. As mentioned above, the site template gallery can be found by going to the top level site in the site collection, then going to Site Actions --> Site Settings --> Modify All Site Settings, and clicking on the "Site Templates" link under the "Galleries" section. Alternatively, you may also use the stsadm -o addtemplate command.b) The next step is that you need to make this template uploaded in the gallery available to individual sites. So that is basically saying that Site A can use template X, but Site
http://A/B can use only template Y. You would note for instance that out of the box, a publishing site lets you choose only "Publishing site with workflow" definition based sites as child sies. Well you can change that. 1. Just go to http://
/_Layouts/AreaTemplateSettings.aspx NOTE: Note down this URL :-), there is no point and click way of getting to at the site level. At a site collection level, you may use Site Settings -> Modify all Site Settings -> Page Layouts and Site Templates to reach the same page. Pick the templates you'd rather have available.
Uploading a Site Template in MOSS 2007
1. Download the site template EXE file to your computer.2. Run the EXE file to unpack the template file to a location on your computer.3. Select the template file, .stp, from the extracted distribution for the application template you wish to install.4. Log into your SharePoint site as the site Administrator.5. From the Site Actions drop-down menu in the top right, select Site Settings.6. Under the Galleries section, select Site templates.7. Select Upload to load an application template into this SharePoint site.8. Browse to the .stp file from the distribution and select Open. If you have several application templates to load into your site, you can use the Upload Multiple Files… option to load them all at once.9. Click Ok to complete the upload of the application template to your SharePoint site.
Applying the new Site Template:
1. Log into your SharePoint site as the site Administrator.2. From the Site Actions drop-down menu in the top right, select Site Settings.3. Under the Site Administration section, select Sites and Workspaces.4. Select Create to create a new site using a site template.5. Complete the new SharePoint site information. In the Template Selection section, select the Custom tab. Any application templates that have been uploaded will be listed here.6. Select the template to use for this site and click Create.7. A site has now been created using the application template.
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Installing Custom Site Templates as Top Level Templates in Central Administration
You can save sites in SharePoint Server 2007 as custom site templates using the browser via the Site Settings page – Look and Feel > Save Site as Template. Note, if you have the Office SharePoint Server Publishing Feature enabled, then the Save Site as Template link will not appear.The Save Site as Template link will save the site template to the site collection Site Template Gallery and the site template will then become available for subsites within the site collection.
But if you want to create a top level site template which you can use as the root site when creating new site collections throughout Web applications, you’ll need to use the SharePoint STSADM command line tool to install the custom site template. The top level site templates are accessed when creating a new site collection in Central Administration – Central Administration > Application Management > Create Site Collection. SharePoint will automatically generate a Custom tab in the Template Selection where any custom site templates will be available for selection.
++install a custom site template using STSADM, where the site template is named exercise and located in the root of Drive C:stsadm –o addtemplate –filename c:\exercise.stp –title exercise
To delete a custom site template:stsadm –o deletetemplate –title exercise
Limit which Site Templates can be used in subsites within a Site Collection
Another recent question was whether you can control which site templates are made available to subsites within a site collection, including those templates defined in site definitions. I haven’t looked at this programmatically yet but you can do this using the administrative user interface, using Page Layout and Site Template Settings:
Site Settings > Look and Feel > Page Layouts and Site Templates
You’re not limited to controlling site templates from the root site of a site collection – you can choose to set the site templates from any site within a site collection. This not only gives you the option of controlling availability of custom site templates but also site definitions, site definition templates and custom site definitions.
Note, in a site where the Office SharePoint Server Publishing Feature is not enabled, the Page Layouts and Site Templates link will not appear under Site Settings. Instead, you can access the respective administrative page by entering the URL directly into the browser address line, such as:
http:///_Layouts/AreaTemplateSettings.aspx
Publishing Templates
Activating Office SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure -Access Denied
One way to achieve this is to temporarily change the AppPool of the web application…
1. Open IIS Admin.2. Location the Web Site for your WSS web application.3. Goto to the properties and select the ‘Home Directory’ tab.4. Change the AppPool to be the same as Central Administration.5. IISRESET6. Activate the Publishing Infrastructure feature on your site.7. Change to AppPool back to the original.8. IISRESET.
This should allow you to enable the feature and use the publishing features within MOSS.
The Publishing Infrastructure provides you, at the site collection level, with a number of document libraries, lists, Web Parts, additional administrative links and SharePoint Groups, as detailed below:
Enable publishing features
On the Site Actions menu, point to Site Settings, and then click Modify All Site Settings.
Note If you do not see additional items when you point to Site Settings, click Site Settings.
Enable publishing at the site level
On the Site Settings page, in the Site Administration section, click Site features.
Next to Office SharePoint Server Publishing, click Activate.
Enable publishing at the site collection level
If you are not at the root of your site, under Site Collection Administration, click Go to top level site settings.
On the Site Settings page, under Site Collection Administration, click Site collection features.
On the Site Collection Features page, next to Office SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure, click Activate.
MOSS Publication Scheduling - Collaboration Portal Template
One of the great things about MOSS publishing sites is the ability to schedule the start and end dates for content publication. However, if you choose to provision your site collection using the out-of-the-box Collaboration Portal site template instead of the Publishing Portal site template, the scheduling option shown below isn't automatically available when creating new publishing pages within a site. But, all is not lost!
To enable the "Page Settings and Schedule" menu option on a site provisioned using the Collaboration Portal site template, simply enable scheduling of items in the site's Pages document library. To do this using the browser:-
Click Site Actions > View All Site Content. On the All Site Content page, under Document Libraries, click on Pages. On the Pages home page, click Settings > Document Library Settings. On the Customize Pages page under General Settings, click Manage item scheduling. On the Manage Item Scheduling page, check Enable scheduling of items in this list and click OK.
Pros and Cons of Site Definitions and Site Templates.
Customization of site definitions holds the following advantages over custom templates:
Data is stored directly on the Web servers, so performance is typically better.
A higher level of list customization is possible through direct editing of a SCHEMA.XML file.
Certain kinds of customization to sites or lists require use of site definitions, such as introducing new file types, defining view styles, or modifying the drop-down Edit menu.
Site definition disadvantages include the following:
Customization of site definition requires more effort than creating custom templates.
It is difficult to edit a site definition after it has been deployed.
Doing anything other than adding code can break existing sites.
Users cannot apply a SharePoint theme through a site definition.
Users cannot create two lists of the same type with different default content.
Customizing site definitions requires access to the file system of the front-end Web server.
Custom templates hold the following advantages over customization of site definitions:
Custom templates are easy to create.
Almost anything that can be done in the user interface can be preserved in the template.
Custom templates can be modified without affecting existing sites that have been created from the templates.
Custom templates are easy to deploy.
Custom template disadvantages include the following:
Custom templates are not created in a development environment.
They are less efficient in large-scale environments.
If the site definition on which the custom template is based does not exist on the front-end server or servers, the custom template will not work.
Increasing the maximum size of list templates
Saving a list as a template is an easy way of transferring data from one place to another in SharePoint. By default, however, the maximum size of list templates in WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 is 10MB. If you try to save the list as a template that is larger than this you will get the following error:The list is too large to save as a template. The size of a template cannot exceed 10485760 bytes.
To increase the maximum size, simply run the following stsadm command (from the C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\BIN directory) replacing the propertyvalue to the new maximum size (in bytes):stsadm -o setproperty -propertyname max-template-document-size -propertyvalue 50000000
Points to note:
The property value parameter is in bytes, so the example above will increase the maximum size to approx 50MB.
There is a hard limit of 500MB so the value must be less than 524288000 or you will get an error when saving the list as a template.
The above increases the maximum size of both site and list templates.
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C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\BIN
To add the solution to Solution Management,
stsadm –o addsolution –filename ApplicationTemplateCore.wsp
Now you want to create a timer job for the Application Template core using
stsadm –o deploysolution –name ApplicationTemplateCore
Application Template Uninstall Walkthrough
This installation was simple. The uninstallation is just as straight forward.
First and foremost you need to retract a solution (not allow SharePoint sites from using it)
stsadm –o retractsolution –name ApplicationTemplateCore
To remove a solution from the server
stsadm –o deletesolution –name ApplicationTemplateCore
The Application Template is now unavailable to SharePoint sites and the solution has been removed from the solution store.
