When MOSS 2007 came out I created a blog post very similar to this one. It turned out to be one of my most popular posts and I received many comments and private emails thanking me for putting the post together. Since the post helped out so many folks I decided to create an updated version for SharePoint 2010.
SharePoint 2010 ships with many predefined site templates you may use to create site collections and sub sites. Sometimes the out of the box site templates will meet the needs of your project. Other times, the out of the box site templates may need to be enhanced.
Knowing which site template has the functionality you need to deploy, or use as a baseline for a custom site definition, is one of the key decisions you make when you architect a SharePoint deployment. This being said, it is important to understand the templates SharePoint 2010 comes with out of the box and what sub sites, lists and pages they support.
This post outlines the site templates SharePoint 2010 comes with out of the box and what sub sites, lists and pages they support. As usual, I’ve documented several useful pieces of information developers will find handy when working with the out of the box SharePoint site templates.
If you install Silverlight on your machine you’ll be presented with a fancy new interface to create sites (shown below). As you can see, SharePoint 2010 offers some guidance when creating new sites by providing descriptions and preview images for each out of the box template. However, not all of the descriptions list which resources the site comes provisioned with and the preview images are no help at all. See the image below, I think you will agree.
To better understand the inventory of out of the box site templates, I created a site collection based on each out of the box site template. After creating 29 different site collections (that’s 6 more than MOSS 2007 if you are keeping track) I realized it would be hard to remember what each one looks like and what resources they offer. So, I decided to take some screenshots and document the site templates.
Preview Images
If you care to see what all of the preview images look like, you can find them in the following directory on your SharePoint server:
C:Program FilesCommon FilesMicrosoft Sharedweb server extensions14TEMPLATELAYOUTS1033IMAGES
The file names for the preview images corresponding to each site template are listed in the tables below.
A More Detailed Look
If you care to see what each of the home pages for the site templates look like you can download screenshots of each and every site template in this zip file. The screenshots should provide you with a good understanding of the different layouts that come with each out of the box template. This should save you a lot of time creating each type of site template on your own machine!
Here’s an example, showing the new Business Intelligence Center; oh how fancy!
Important planning information related to the out of the box site Templates!
Available Sub Site Templates
The next table lists the WEBTEMP XML fragment files each site template and configuration are defined in, the concatenated template and configuration string you need when making sites with the site template programmatically, and the file name of the preview image. If you wish to change the out of the box preview images I recommend backup up the existing preview images, then replacing them with your new preview images that have the same file names. Feel free to use the images I created from screenshots of each site template’s out of the box home page to do so. You can download them here.
Note: You may have to perform this process again after a service pack is applied in the future. Editing the various WEBTEMP files that come out of the box is not a recommended approach; that’s why I recommend this approach.
As I mentioned before, knowing which sub sites, lists, and pages are available within a given site template are key peices of information you will want to know when you architect a SharePoint solution. This Excel workbook displays which sub site templates are available for a given parent site template.
New Site Templates
The following site templates are new to SharePoint 2010.
| Group Work Site |
| Visio Process Repository |
| Assets Web Database |
| Charitable Contributions Web Database |
| Contacts Web Database |
| Issues Web Database |
| Projects Web Database |
| Business Intelligence Center |
| Enterprise Search Center |
| Basic Search Center |
| FAST Search Center |
| Enterprise Wiki |
Deprecated / Removed Site Templates
The following site templates are deprecated or removed in SharePoint 2010.
| Wiki Site |
| Site Directory |
| Report Center |
| Search Center with Tabs |
| Search Center |
| Collaboration Portal |
| News Site |
Available Lists
Similarly, this Excel workbook displays which lists are available for a given site template.
Available Pages
Finally, this Excel workbook displays which types of pages are available to create within a given site template.
Buried Treasure: Hidden Templates!
Many of the site templates listed in the following table are left over from the previous versions of SharePoint and are marked obsolete. However some of them may be created programmatically. I included the list of all the hidden site templates here for reference.
Hidden site templates (not including Global template or Central Administration):
Leverage this information to create SharePoint sites programmatically
The concatenated template and configuration string is used when creating sites programmatically. See the last line of code below for an example.
//Create a new SPSite object corresponding to your top level site
SPSite newSite = new SPSite("http://dev");
//Create a new SPWeb object from the newSite object
SPWeb newWeb = newSite.OpenWeb();
//Return the collection of sub sites
SPWebCollection subSites = newWeb.Webs;
//Create a new sub site by adding it to the sub site collection
//The new site will have the following metadata:
//Full URL once created: http://dev/newsite
//Name: New Site
//Description: This is the description for my new site.
//Local ID set to 1033 – English
//Site Template: Team Site
//Use Unique Permissions: True
SPWeb newSubWeb = subSites.Add("newsite", "New Site", "This is the description for my new site.", 1033, "STS#0", true, false);
Once again, I hope this post comes in handy for you and saves you the time I spent digging through the SharePoint file system and creating dozens of SharePoint sites to find the information. All the information in this post comes from the public beta 2 version of SharePoint Server 2010. I’ll update this post once SharePoint 2010 goes RTM.
UPDATE: 10/21/2010
Joe Gasper collated the information in the tables which appear in my blog post into an Excel Workbook. You can find it here.
Hi Marcus,
To compile the list I created a site based on each site template then went to the create a site page for each site and examined the list of available sub sites.
You are right, the Enterprise Search site does not allow you to make a Business Intelligence Center sub site. That was a typo on my part and it has been fixed.
I verified the available sub sites for a Publishing Site and they are correct.
Thanks for your comments.
Todd
Hi Chris,
I’m not sure what is in store for the site directory in SP 2010. I’ll ping some folks and see what I can find out.
Any idea what has happend or is happening with knowledge base template?
Cheers
Rich
Tipp für Partner: noch bis 29.3.2010 Partner-Promotion für Microsoft SharePoint for Internet Sites bis
In SharePoint 2010 there are lots of Site Templates to chose from. Todd Baginski has an AWESOME page
Much thanks for this, Todd. We’re moving from WSS3 to SP2010 Enterprise. The planning is a bit overwhelming, and this helps. Since we want all corporate-wide subsites under the base URL (sp.ourcompany.com), looks like Publishing Site is the template to choose.
Todd, useful post, but can you indicate (or provide a hint) on understanding which are available for Foundation please! Also, I have SP2010 Beta from MS, how do I know which features are Foundation-only ones? Developing a groupwide intranet.
Hidden deprecated site templates in SharePoint 2010
Thanks for the screenshots. Really a time saver. Good to know those hidden templates.
In SharePoint 2010 there are lots of Site Templates to chose from. Todd Baginski has an AWESOME page
Very nice summary of Sharepoint site templates
Thanks for pointing it out Josh, it’s fixed now.
How do you create a subsite using the same template as the parent site without recreating everything?
Thanks!
Hi Sherri,
Go to site settings and save the site as a template. Then create a new site based off the template.
Awesome. Thanks a lot for sharing!
Thank-you for a terrific article. Succint, to the point, and full of the acronyms, abbreviations and IDs us developers love. Thanks!
Hope you don’t mind; I’ve massaged your collected information into a spreadsheet that I think can help quickly show the differences (available subsites, lists, and pages) between the templates:
cid-34ab6a14a19ad611.office.live.com/…/…s.xlsx
Thank you Todd for working out this information.
Great post Todd, on the programatically way to provision sites, I now use PowerShell rather than code C#, pretty cool way w/out cracking open VS.
Thank you
Thanks for compiling this info! It has been very helpful in our planning process.
Fyi there is also a PowerPivot#0 TemplateName which has a TemplateID of 12345 and the following default description:
"A site for teams to share workbooks in a PowerPivot Gallery, which includes a choice of interactive visualizations with thumbnail previews, data refresh settings, and the ability to create new reports. The site also provides a document library, and lists for managing announcements, calendar items, tasks, and discussions."
Thanks for the information, this is a must read for people like me who get lost in forest pretty easily
I love the BI Center Site Template, however the Content Placeholder for Search does not appear to be enabled in that template. How would I go about modifying my Master page to always enable the Search?
Wow that a faboulus article, you know how much time it saved. Thank you once again.
I was searching for records center in 2010, Now I get it
Thanks & Regards
Senthil
Thanks a lot for sharing. NICE WORK!
Thanks for this wonderful article. Appreciate it!
Now THAT is a great post. I realize I’m a little late stumbling across it, but this is exactly the information I needed (particularly the concatenated string reference) and cooler still, the fact you embedded lookups in the post to sort the data. Awesome. I thought they were screenshots when I first glanced over it.
Sean
http://blog.brainlitter.com
This is helpful – thanks for the post Todd!
Hey Todd, great post! One mistake I noticed – the Document Center config should be 0, making the concatenated string "BDR#0". The ID of the site definition is 7, but the config ID is 0.
Thanks for the post.
Document Center’s concatenated string is actually just BDR.
This is awesome. Very much needed Information! Thanks Todd!
@SharePointLola
Just a quick FYI…A javascript error comes up on your page when you try to use either of the drop down selection filters.
Webpage error details;
Message: Object expected
Line: 589 Char: 1 Code: 0
Message: Object expected
Line: 221 Char: 1 Code: 0
This is awesome. Very much needed Information! Thanks Todd!
@SharePointLola
Just a quick FYI…A javascript error comes up on this page when you try to use either of the drop down selection filters.
fantastic post to have a quick look on the available template and other stuffs on sharepoint.
I found those dropdowns not working? is it my browser or something wrong?
Its a great post.
Thanks
I found those drop-downs not working? is it my browser or something wrong?
Its a great post.
Thanks
Excellent article. Thanks
This is great information, however I still need to see the scope of each template, appreciate your feedback, thank you.
Hello friends,this is a nice site and I wanted to post a note to let you know, good job! Thanks
Best regards, Natali, CEO of iscsi initiator for windows
Nice article. I just stumbled upon your blog and wanted to say that I have really enjoyed reading your articles. Anyway I’ll be subscribing to your feed and I hope you post again soon.
You are rocking the Show man…
Thanks for the post
There is also a PowerPoint Broadcast Template if OWA’s are installed as per my list http://www.wssdemo.com/Lists/SiteTemplates/AllItems.aspx whichalso shows the SKU required for the template to be installed.