Site Definition vs Web Template for product site

Question

I'm getting ready to create a product for SharePoint, and I'd like it to be as easy as possible for people to deploy and use.

I was planning on using a Site Definition, since this seems like a great way to have an installable solution. Just create an installer that runs powershell or something nice!

However, I've been reading a lot about Web Templates lately, and the idea of having a Sandbox compatible solution seems like a good way to market to /sites/ users, who have no server side access.

The problem I'm working with, is that a Site Definition can be added easily by a SCA in the create subsite menu, whereas a Web Template seems to be deployable ONLY from Central Admin, which defeats the purpose a little bit. What am I missing in making this decision?

Answer 1

Have you had a chance to look over the following link?

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vesku/archive/2010/10/14/sharepoint-2010-and-web-templates.aspx#sitetemplate

"One of the consideration with the site templates is also the fact that unless you import them to Visual Studio and modify its settings, they are only available on site collection level (site collection scoped feature), which means that to be able to have the template available from multiple locations, we’ll have to either deploy the site template as sandbox solution to multiple site collections or deploy it as full trust solution and then activate the particular feature in site collections to have the template available."

then

"When we have our web template created, we’ll associate the element file to feature, which will be responsible of deploying the web template. WebTemplate element is supported in two scopes, which are Farm and Site. This means that we can deploy the web templates to be available either throughout the farm or based on site collection scoped feature activation. It’s important to notice that dispute the fact that we’d be using site collection scoped feature for deployment, we can still deploy the web template using farm scoped feature. This would for example give us possibility to filter the options available from the Create site functionality, based on feature activation status."

From what I have read, web templates are the way to go