SharePoint 2010 Site Templates: Create, Save and Use

SharePoint site is the key place to bring together all content and activities associated with a particular process, project or group. And there are situations when these processes or projects are regularly repeated within an organization. So to ensure consistency and facilitate continuous improvement a site template can be helpful and time saving.

I faced a situation where the Site hierarchy has to be as below

Where sub sites- my_site and another_site has to identical and can be as many as 10 or more. Similarly sub-sub sites- site_3 and site_4 has to be same and can be as many as 10 or more.

So I decided to create 2 custom site templates, one for sub site level and other for sub –sub site level.

1. Create a new web application using Central Administration

Go to Application Management > Web Applications > Manage Web Application and Click New

Select the Authentication, Site Name and Port etc as required.

Click OK and you will see the message as below.

2. Create Site Collection (Top Site)

Go to Application Management > Site Collections > Create Site Collection

Select the Title, Url, Template and Collection administrators as desired and click OK. The resultant screen will be as below.

Your sample Top Site is

3. Create Sub Site

SiteSettings > Site Administration > Sites and workspaces

Select Title, address and Template as desired.

Click Create and your sub site will be ready

4. Create Template from SubSite1

Customize the SubSite 1 as specified in the requirement and then

Go to Site Settings > Site Actions > Save Site Template

Give some name you can remember and recognize

Click OK and your template will be saved to Template Gallery.

5. Create SubSite2 from Template

Create SubSite2 as mentioned in point 3, but select Template > Custom > SubSiteTemplate



Click on create and you will get SubSite2 similar to SubSite1. You don't have to redo all the things as done in SubSite1.