Cleaning up Site Templates that aren't used

Question

I am currently on a project where I have been asked to clean up the Site Template gallery from various collections across the organization. One of the offending web apps has one site collection where sties and/or subsites are created for collaboration. The goal is to removed unused .stp files. We do not deploy templates through solutions :( My questions as follows: 1.) Is there a way to see a complete inventory of sites and the template it uses without much code. Would love to do this from the UI. This can give an idea of sites we can safely delete. 2.) I am under assumption that we can delete the stp as required and current sites based off the deleted template will still be intact? I just don't want current sites to be impacted. 3.) Lastly,

Outside as deploying templates as wsp solutions are there any other critical best practices in creating templates. Ideally we don't want owners to keep cluttering up the template gallery with crap.

Paul

Answer 1

You can see the available templates for a given site collection in the Site Collection Gallery which is available from the Site Settings page. That Gallery will include any templates (site definitions) deployed to the server as well as any templates that were exported from the site as "stp" files. The exported ones will only be available in that one gallery for that given Site Collection. To do a complete cleanup you would need to review the gallery in each site collection.

I'm not sure what the "best practice" would be other than to make sure that users who are able to create a template be trained enough to know what they are doing and how to clean up any unneeded templates.