SharePoint Online templates best practice and guidance

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I'm wondering if anyone can point me in the direction of any articles around creating and managing templates. In particular I am keen to hear about your approach to centralising the templates, content types, and various assets (images, CSS, etc.).  

Do you recommend a seperate site collection to house these assets?

Do you make use of the content type hub to publish these out? 

How much customisation have you done to sites (eg. team site) - and created your own template of it?

Is it best to keep the templates as vanilla as possible and then add custom libraries or "apps"? 

cheers!

4 Replies

For site templates you should look for SharePoint Patterns and Practises Remote Provisioning (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/pnp_articles/pnp-remote-provisioning). I have used PnP PowerShell to export site as a template and applied template to another site.

 

My recommendation is to use separate site collection for hosting assest, like images, CSS and JavaScript. I also use Content Type Hub to centrally manage content types and site columns.

 

And, of course, as vanilla as possible.

cool, thanks - is it quite complicated to get your head around PnP if not developer?
Yeap, if you are not a developer it's going to be difficult for you to get your head around PnP

True, if you are building whole provisioning solution. One option is to create template site manually, export it to PnP provisioning template and import it to newly created sites with PnP PowerShell. It requires manual operation, and it's viable solution for large number of sites.