Recently one of our clients requested a change in a custom-built SharePoint application. The original version of the application was built for SharePoint (MOSS) 2007 using Visual Studio 2008, then upgraded to SharePoint 2010 using Visual Studio 2010. Later the site was upgraded to SharePoint 2013, without any change in the code of the solution.
Now we had to create a replica of the site in our developer environment including the list data. We pulled a backup of the site using the Export-SPWeb cmdlet successfully in the productive system, and created a new team site in the development system as a target of the Import-SPWeb cmdlet. When executing the restore operation we’ve got this exception:
Import-SPWeb : Cannot import site. The exported site is based on the template STS#0 but the destination site is based on the template STS#1. You can import sites only into sites that are based on same template as the exported site.
In the error message STS#0 means the Team Site template, and STS#1 stands for the Blank Site template (see SharePoint site template IDs and their description here). Jason Warren suggests in this thread to use the -Force switch of the Import-SPWeb cmdlet to force the overwrite of the existing site, but we had the same issue even using this switch. How could we create a new web site using the Blank Site template? Solutions available using the server side, like using PowerShell or unhiding the Blank Site template are discussed in this thread. But what could we do, if we had no access to the server side, as this site template is not available on the web UI anymore?
We found a simply solution using only a single browser (Internet Explorer in our case) and the F12 Developer Tools.
Load the site creation page in the browser, then start the Developer Tools, and select the list of templates using the DOM Explorer.
Select an options in the select element, like the Team Site…
… change its value attribute to STS#1…
… and finally click the Create button on the web page to create the new blank site.
This solution is quick, but I consider it to be dirty, as users should perform it themselves and each time they need a blank site, so definitely not a user friendly option. But it might be handy if you need a simple way without access to the server side.
