Site Collection Creation and re-parenting

[Note : This post is part of  my main blog “Segregating Large MOSS 2007 Sites” and “SharePoint 2010 Migration”]

When you are importing a SPWeb or an SPWeb tree in to a new Site Collection, you will want to first create new site collection.  Now moving a given SPWeb as Root Web in to a new Site Collection is called re-parenting. From the above references you will get the more on this. But something I wanted to emphasize and clarify why we should create a new Site Collection via an STSADM  createsite as supposed to SPWebApplication.CreateSite().

SPWebApplication.CreateSite().

Result: 

• Site Collection
• -->Rootweb is created with given Template Type (STS/MPS/Custom)

What happens here: you can only import on top of the RootWeb. So the end result is that your imported web is always a sub web of the rootweb.

 

STSADM  createsite

Result: 

• Site Collection
• -->Rootweb is created with Blank Template Type (NOT STS/MPS/Custom)

What happens here: you can import in to the RootWeb. So the end result is that your imported web can be at rootweb level.