SharePoint Template Gotchas

I am having to do a lot of simple web part movement and site design stuff lately and I ran across some issues that threw me...

In the past, I have created a site and configured the basic web parts that I wanted set up the primary pages generically and configured everything the way I wanted to see it anytime I created a new sub site. I would then go to the Site Settings and to Look and Feel then save the site as a template. Anytime I wanted my generic site look, I would simply create a new subsite with this template. Easy peasy.

This time I was working on a Publishing Site that would need several sub sites that would all have the same basic properties, lists, and web part views. I created the first site, clicked on up the Site Settings, looked over at Look and Feel and... Nothing. No Save Site as a Template link. What the...?? I stated going through the site features and even in to Central Admin to see if I had all of the Farm Features active that I needed to be active. No Dice.

It turns out that Publishing Sites can not be saved as templates. Bummer.

SharePoint being SharePoint, many times you can do things you are not supposed to do if you know how to use the forms and other features, I decided to poke around to see if I could get things to work the way I wanted to. The first thing I found was that if I deactivated the Publishing features, I could save the site as a template, create a new site, then activate the Publishing features at that time... This would do what I wanted... kind of. I wanted a better solution, so I tried a trick that I learned to do when I had a number of web parts that I wanted to delete from a page, to grab the actual template save application page URL and append that on to my publishing site URL to see if I could get it to save the template as I wanted it.

The URL of the save as a template application page is: _layouts/savetmpl.aspx. So my site URL: http://MOSS2007/TemplateSite became http://MOSS2007/TemplateSite/_layouts/savetmpl.aspx
To my wonder and surprise the application page popped up and I was able to save the site as a template. I created a new site using this template, and it worked like a champ.
Turns out my buddy Shane Young already had this figured out way back when. Go figure...