Create Site Collections from Web Template in SharePoint 2010

I happened to work on a project where we had to create site collection based on the web templates. In SharePoint 2010, when you save a site as template, it is saved as a sandbox solution.
But as we know, sandbox solutions are site collection scoped. So we will see how we can deploy one of these at the farm level and create site collections using the web template.

First we will create a site based on the Team site template, make some changes and save it as template.


I have customized the home page a little to make it look different from the default team site template.
Now go to Site Settings and click on Save site as template


This will save the template to the solution gallery of the site collection
Click on the solution gallery link in the success dialog.
Use the open with explorer feature and copy the wsp.


Open the solution using Visual Studio 2010 now. Create a new SharePoint project of type Import SharePoint Solution and select Deploy as a Farm Solution.


Select the copied wsp from the Browse dialog


In the next dialog that appears you will be able to select the components to import from the wsp. Leave everything select and click on Finish


Visual Studio will give the success message for the import


Now you will see a lot modules and four features in the solution explorer. One of these features contains the files related to the web template.
Double click on each feature to open the properties for that feature.
Generally Feature3.feature contains the files related to the web  tempalte.
Open this feature and change the scope of the feature to Farm.


Then expand the Files in the web template that you see in the above screen. and click on the Elements.xml file.


This will open the Elements.xml file for the web template. Add another parameter to the list of parameters called DisplayCategory. This is the category under which your template will be visible in the site collection creation page.


Change the Subweb parameter to TRUE so that subsites can be created using this template.
Then, double click on the other features to see the properties. Set the IsHidden property to TRUE for all the other features.


Deploy the solution and try creating a new site collection.
This time you will see a new category and a new template along with the default.


Create a new site using the custom template you created.


It is as simple as that. SharePoint 2010 and Visual Studio 2010 have made life easier for the developers haven't they !!!.

Comments

  1. UnknownJuly 30, 2013 at 9:12 AM

    So once this web template has been deployed as a feature, how would it be maintained and updated?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. UnknownOctober 16, 2013 at 6:36 PM

      Hi, Templates are only linked to the site at the time of creation - so if you change a template, sites built on previous versions of the template to not update to match the new version.

      Hope this helps.
      Rich

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Create web part pages with custom layouts in SharePoint 2010

Image
SharePoint provides web part pages with eight layouts by default. Unfortunately the process of creating web part pages with custom layouts is a little complex. In this post i will show you how you can create web part pages with custom layouts. I have created a component which will deploy an application page which can be used to achieve this. Go to http://archive.msdn.microsoft.com/customspcf  and download the wsp file with the name CustomSPCF.wsp Deploy the solution. This will deploy an application page at /_layouts/customspcf/customspcf.aspx It will add four web part page layouts at 14\Template\1033\Sts\Doctemp\Smartpgs\CustomSPCF\ and four images corresponding to the layout at 14\Template\Images\CustomSPCF\ The below image shows how the application page will look like You can customize the application page and replace the deployed custom layouts or add new layouts. Follow the below steps to replace the exisitng layouts. 1. Go to the applciation page at 14\Templates\L
Read more

Create a Custom Timer Job in SharePoint 2010

Image
I had to create a custom timer job in SharePoint 2010 recently, but could not find a blog which explained the complete procedure to do this. So I decided to write one. In this post I will give a step by step process to create a Custom timer job in SharePoint 2010 using Visual Studio 2010. Timer jobs are created by extending the SPJobDefinition class and deployed as features. So we will create a class which extends the SPJobDefinition class. Then we will create a feature and we will handle the featureActivated() event of that feature. In that we will instantiate the class created. Let us see how to do all this. Create an empty SharePoint project in VS 2010. Give the Site Collection URL where you want this feature will be activated. Create a class in the project.   Add these namespaces using Microsoft.SharePoint; using Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration; class MyTimerJob : SPJobDefinition { public MyTimerJob() : base () { } public MyTimerJob( SPWebApplic
Read more

SharePoint list forms display HTML instead of rendering

Image
I have recently come across a problem where a custom list form i created using SharePoint designer was displaying the HTML directly instead of rendering it. As shown above the HTML for the Assigned To column value is not being rendered. To overcome this you just have to add a simple property to you XSLT. Select the HTML that is displayed and go to the code view. You will see the statement as <xsl:value-of select="@Assigned TO"></xsl:value-of> To this you have to add a parameter called display-output-escaping <xsl:value-of select="@Assigned TO" display-output-escaping="yes"></xsl:value-of> As you can see, this time the HTML is rendered properly.
Read more