Wss 2.0 and Wss 3.0 - Templates structure Comparison
Introduction
This is a small comparison between Wss 2.0 and Wss 3.0 regarding the site templates. simply reviewing the folder structures will give you a better understanding on what happened in Wss3.0.
Why do I need to know?
This might help you in two ways. One, when you migrate from Wss 2.0, you'll be looking were to keep your sites. specially if you did gradual upgrades. Second, when you want to understant how WSS read and aggregate the templates for your portals.
So, What is the Defferance?
put in mind that our base folder will be: "Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions/60/ "
The mechanizim is done as follows:
WSS2.0
In 2.0, WSS will take all files that have the name "Webtemp*.xml" in 'Template\1033\xml' folder and aggregate them into one xml. each webtemp* file will point to a folder inside "Template\1033\xml" and will have the same name as the * in the "Webtemp*.xml".
So when you go and create a site, you'll be asked to choose a template and one of the templastes you'll see is the set of templates that are created in 'Template\1033' in this case.
WSS3.0
In 3.0, WSS will take all files that have the name "Webtemp*.xml" in 'Template\1033\xml' folder and aggregate them into one xml. each webtemp* file will point to a folder inside "Template\SiteTemplates" and will have the same name as the * in the "Webtemp*.xml".
So when you go and create a site, you'll be asked to choose a template and one of the templastes you'll see is the set of templates that are created in 'Template\SiteTemplates' in this case.
