Background

DotNetNuke provides support for templating at a number of levels (including Page templates). One of these is "portal" templates.
These portal templates can specify a number of properties for the new portal, including:

• Portal details: the properties that define the portal (skins, title, options...)
• Roles: roles that will be created by default on the new portal
• Tabs: you can define all the tabs the new portal will include and specify the properties of those tabs
• Modules: define for each tab all the modules that should be installed
• Content: the template can also include the content for modules that support new
• Profile property definitions
  

With the release of 5.0, exporting a template now also exports PortalDesktopModules (i.e. the friendly name, permissionkey and rolenames that have access) and DesktopModulePermissions.

Creating/Exporting a template

To create a template to use as the basis of an install or adding a new portal to an existing installation, log into the site as a superuser (Host Account). Go to Host -> Portals and scroll down to the Export Template section. Select the portal to export from the list, and then provide a filename and description. There is a checkbox entitled "include content" which if selected will iterate through the site modules, determine if they support IPortable and if so export their content.

Once the portal has been exported you will get a message stating where the content can be found. The template file itself will end in a .template extension, and if you elected to export content then a .template.resources file will be in the same location. These file(s) can now be copied to your new location i.e. the \Portals\_default folder of the new site.

Importing a template

Note: before importing a template you must ensure that any skins, Containers,Skin Objects or Modulesmodules the template will expect have been installed. Finally, your new site will not have any users (except for the default host user and whatever site user you create), you may wish to populate the users as a seperate exercise.

Login to your portal as a superuser (Host Account), go to Host -> Portals and click "add new portal". Provide the portal details as directed, and then select the template file you want to use from the dropdown. Finally click create and you'll see your new site based on your template.

Note: Portal templates are usually supported only for the same version of the framework being used on source and target installation.