Custom templates using SP-ExportWeb

When creating custom templates for users, you have following possibilities:

1. Create a template in Visual Studio
2. Create a template website in SharePoint and save website as a template (wsp).
3. Create a template website in SharePoint and save it with Export-SPWeb powershell command.

Each of this solutions has its drawbacks:

Ad 1. complex and time consuming solution, prone to errors.
Ad 2. Following features are not supported: Customized permissions, running workflow instances, list item version history, workflow tasks associated with running workflows, people or group field values, taxonomy field values, publishing pages and publishing sites, My Sites, and stapled features. See following article http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj938033.aspx#bkmk_WhatIsTemplate
Ad 3. the taxonomy fields in the website created from template in the different sharepoint farm will be broken.

As the title suggests I will describe the third option in this article.

Creating the template

1. Create your template in SharePoint. (Activate the features, add lists, fields and documents)
2. Open the Powershell console and execute following command:

Export-SPWeb http://yoursite–Path "c:\temp\export.cmp"

Creating a website from the template
Create new empty website and use the Import-SPWeb to import the content from the file:
New-SPSite http://newsiteurl/ -OwnerAlias "loginname" -Name "newWebSiteName"
Import-SPWeb http://newsiteurl/ -Path "c:\temp\export.cmp" -IncludeUserSecurity

The advantage of this approach is, that if you create a new version of the template you can reimport it on an existing website. The changes in the new template will be merged with the changes in the existing website made by the users . However I recommend to create a backup from the website before reimporting.

There are two things  that remain open:

1. The metadata fields will not be relinked to the termsets after importing into another farm.
2. The “Self Service Creation”-like functionality is missing. There is some development that needs to be done.

Maybe next time.