Site Provisioning Best Practice

 

Site Provisioning is always important in SharePoint Projects. In this article I’ll put every interesting information on this subject.

Even if its about SharePoint 2010, following Post is really interesting and in my eyes a must read: SharePoint 2010 and web templates.

So what are the different Provisioning Possibilities:

1 Full-blown Site Definition:

In my opinion site Definitions are not really an option because it’s not supported to change the onet.xml once a single Site is provisioned using this site definition. A possible Workaround is the “minimal Site Definition approach”.

2 minimal Site Definition

I’ll update this part once I explore this possibility.

3 WebTemplates

I tried Vesa Juvonen’s solution in the above linked Post. It worked fine even with SharePoint 2013. I just needed make some small changes.

So What Changed in SharePoint 2013?

In 2013 It seems to me that deploying a Web with a WebTemplate will fail if some features from the <SiteFeatures> section of the web Onet.xml are not activated.

So this part was not working:

I simply included this part in the WebFeature part: