SharePoint Online and site templates

So far, we've covered Site Definitions, Site Templates, and Web Templates. One would think that with these three template types, developers could create any style of SharePoint site with full freedom and flexibility to customize sites. There is a slight roadblock here that subsequently forces us to move away from all these template types in SharePoint Online.

In SharePoint Online, developers do not have direct disk access. As such, developers are unable to take a peek at the SharePoint Hive and select from the list of available Site Definitions what kind of Web Template they are about to create. Of course, Microsoft has published the full list of supported Site Definitions, but the limitations of Web Templates is often a major challenge. For this purpose, and other smaller but persistent issues, developers needed something more manageable and something that could better be molded into whatever needs a project might have for a custom SharePoint site.

The solution is remote provisioning. We will cover remote provisioning in much more detail later in this book, but suffice to say that this approach allows for most freedom for developers while also maintaining full fidelity and supportability to any of the existing Site Definitions that SharePoint Online currently supports. With remote provisioning, developers either scan through newly-created sites or get an event (a sort of trigger) that a new site is being provisioned. Upon finding one, they can programmatically verify the origins of the site and the base template it was provisioned from--typically this would be a Team Site, Developer Site, or a Blank Site. Armed with this information, developers can then use the APIs to instruct the new site to re-configure itself based on another template--which would be a templating system the developer has coined.

It's not important to understand all the intricacies of the cumbersome SharePoint site template system as it has a 15 year history and most of that history is irrelevant for SharePoint Online developers. But it is essential to understand the basics of the templating system, especially the limitations developers might face when initially creating new SharePoint deployments.

When developing SharePoint Online-based solutions, you always need to base your solutions on the assumption that sites are based on a pre-defined site definition. You could also force the selection of the base template and discourage the user from selecting a template that might not be suitable for your needs. If you scan through the templates in the site collection creation dialog, you'll see there are a lot of templates that might not make sense today, such as the Visio Process Repository template that has a very specific usage.