How to: Define a Portal Site Template
When building portal sites with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, you might need to provision multiple site rather than single sites. For single sites, you use the functionality from Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and create site templates. For multiple sites, however, you create portal site templates, which contain the hierarchy of sites to provision. By using a portal site template, users can quickly provision multiple sites in a hierarchy.
To define a new portal site template
In the path
C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\TEMPLATE\1033\XML, create a new portal site template .xml file with the Web hierarchy you want.Locate the webtemp*.xml file in the path
C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\TEMPLATE\1033\XML.In the Templates element, add a Template element that contains the file name of the portal site template file you created in Step 1.
Create site definition files, page layouts, and master pages for each of the sites to be created and link them to the root site definition file.
Create site definition files for each site. For more information, see the following: Creating a Site Definition from an Existing Site Definition (Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 SDK), ONET.XML (Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 SDK), and WEBTEMP.XML (Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 SDK).
Create page layouts and a master page. These are used to create welcome pages and to define the overall look of the portal site.
In the root site definition file, add references to the master page and page layouts so that they are uploaded to the intended galleries.
In the webtemp*.xml file, add a Template element that contains the site definitions for the sites in your portal site definition file.
See Also
Tasks
How to: Create a Minimal Master Page