Creating Site Templates from MOSS publishing sites

Question

I know that creating a site template from a MOSS publishing site is not currently supported by Microsoft.

Can anyone tell me if creating a basic site, then turning on the publishing feature, then creating a site template is supported - I would guess not as it's probably the same as creating a publishing portal?

Answer 1

You can staple the publishing feature onto your site template.

From KB 986908:

You can create a stapling feature to staple the Office SharePoint Server Publishing feature to specific site templates. For example, see the Feature.xml file in the "Drive:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web server extensions\12\Template\Features\PublishingStapling" folder. To staple the Office SharePoint Server Publishing feature to all site templates, use the TemplateName="GLOBAL" property. This property staples a particular feature to a site definition if the site definition does not specify the AllowGlobalFeatureAssociations property. (Only the Shared Services Provider site template and the Blank Site site template use the AllowGlobalFeatureAssociations="FALSE" property.)

For example, when you use the TemplateName="GLOBAL" property to staple the Office SharePoint Server Publishing feature, a site that is based on the Team site template uses the system master page that is configured for the root site of the site collection.

Answer 2

you can still access the save template webpage, and save it... for example http://localhost/website/_layouts/savetmpl.aspx and it works like a charm :-)

Answer 3

So why all of this and why there isn't any save this site as template in Publishing site? :(

Answer 4

I don't think what you're describing will work (like you said, it's basically the same thing as a Publishing Portal), but there appears to be a workaround. According to this post from the SharePoint Solutions Team (apparently not related to Microsoft), you can create a publishing site, customize it as needed, deactivate the publishing feature, create a site template from it, create a new site based on the template, and then activate the publishing feature on your new site.

It sounds like this works, but is not officially supported by Microsoft. Be careful, since it may mostly work, but I wouldn't be surprised if some small pieces of it break.

Answer 5

We wrote our own tooling to solve the export problem. We can create site columns, content types, master pages, page layouts etc in the Publishing site, and export selected items to a WSP package for deployment to other servers.

The tool SPSource takes a similar approach, but creates a Visual Studio solution for compilation. The result can be packaged with WSPBuilder.