Best practices for provisioning SharePoint 2013 sites / site collections with templates

Question

I want to start prototyping a team or community site in 2013 on fairly standard intranet, with a view making it a template for the various departments. I am still revising the design for the intranet so deciding to go for just sub sites or host named site collections, and or managed navigation. I am in the requirements phase currently.

Now it occurred to me I need a definite strategy to allow the client to effectively manage site and or, site collection creation; based on the community best practices.

Therefore, I have listed some of options available and would welcome any comments:

1. Do it pretty much all in the browser / SPD 2013 and save the solution in the solution gallery - now the issue will be if the source site for the template has publishing features turned on and the destination sites has it turned off. I guess I will need to deploy display templates and other artefacts outside this.
2. Do some / all of the project template in Visual Studio 2013 inc list defs and content types ( lots of Guids and features!) - I do understand this has a changed a bit since 2010 which I need to research. Also, sub sites are not provisioned by default, without custom (server side code) such as a feature receiver.
3. Consider Site definitions from the outset
4. Create an App, hosted in an admin portal to handle the provsioning of site, and or site collections based on any of the above options.

My client is new to SharePoint and have now been persuaded to go down the 2013 route and I really want to hide the complexity but give them an overall great experience.

Daniel

Answer 1

Vesa "vesku" Juvonen has some nice articles on Site provisioning techniques and remote provisioning in SharePoint 2013 and SharePoint 2010 and web templates. These articles describes how you can do stuff and when.