We have been using the site template feature with a rather large site implementation. Here are a few points for understanding the configuration and then I'll go through the issue we see.
1) The site template is made up of roughly 100 pages
2) There are numerous web content portlets on the pages that are configured as "global scope" portlets and they point to "global scope" web content and that web content includes links to "global scope" documents and media.
3) In some cases, there are pages that do have asset publishers configured with "default" scope web content display portlets, pointing to locally scoped web content that refers or includes locally scoped documents and media.
The issue we are running into revolves around the fact that when a site is created from the template, it seems that all of the global web content and the assets that the web content refer to are exported into the zip file that end temporarily in the temp folder of the server (tomcat). Aside from the known issues related to LAR exports/imports, Local/Remote staging and this feature itself, I wanted to bring up the following question...
Why do we need to export all of the Global scope elements when creating a site from the site template? Can't we just skip those? Their ID's will all be the same since by design, the site being created must exist in the same portal and therefore would have access to the global scope. If we could just skip dealing with the global scope content and its assets all together, it would seem that site creation (and updates) from a template could be much more efficient. Our current time for site creation is upward of two hours and it increases each time a site is created.
Any ideas out there? I'd be more than happy to continue discussing details and helping think through the specific use cases that we have seen when using site templates, remote staging, LAR imports/exports and workflow in concert... its amazing that we've gotten this far but there is some room for improvement. There is another issue regarding the fact that updates to templates don't seem to be based on the Differential Publishing Engine but that is a seperate topic (I think).
