SharePoint Dragons

Just stumbled across this. It’s not possible to use PowerShell to create a site based on a site template.

In this example, we’ve created a site template called “mytemplate” based on the “STS” template. Normally, you can use the new-spweb cmdlet and specify a template like so:

new-spweb http://moon/sites/sc1/autosite1 -template “mytemplate”

(Or add –whatif to the end if you’re getting cold feet).The –tempate parameter accepts a piped spwebtemplate object, which can be retrieved via:

Get-SPWebTemplate | more

As you will see, a site template saved in the site collection solution catalog won’t show up here. As an alternative, you can try to establish the template that was used to create an existing web site, like so (please note, we’ve created a site called “myinstance” using the “mytemplate” site template:

$web = get-spweb http://moon/sites/sc1/myinstance

write-host “Web Template:” $web.WebTemplate ” | Web Template ID:” $web.WebTemplateId

$web.Dispose()

If you experiment with this, you will find that the web template it still the underlying parent of the saved template. In my case “mytemplate” was based on the “STS” template, so that’s still the one that is actually the web template of “myinstance”.