I am creating a new site collection to serve as an intranet on the SP2016 foundation.
For our portal sites, I want to design a handful of sites which will be reused as templates. There's nothing fancy here -- just particular web parts laid out in a particular way, like Summary links with headers I want to be standardized across all sites, a CQWB that pulls filtered data from lists, a site contact web part, a list of links that would be the same on all the sites.
I want the publishing feature enabled for all these sites. With that enabled, however, the "save site as a template" option is not allowed or supported. The most common workarounds I've found suggest that there are pitfalls and things can fail. (These warnings tend to be vague but you see them enough I'm convinced I want to avoid them.)
In my testing, though, I have successfully just gone to "Manage Content and Structure" and just used the COPY operation to copy one of these sites and paste that copy in a new location.
Are there any problems with this approach? If it works, I'm just going to create a site collection called "Site Types" or something like that, design each of my site types as a subsite there, and when I need to create a new one elsewhere in the site collection, perform this copy from Manage Content and Structure.
Any pitfalls with this? Thanks.