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.