Web/Site Templates in SharePoint Online Modern Pages? No problem.

Let’s imagine that we want to have site template with predefined design, sections, web parts on it, lists with additional fields, custom page settings etc. etc.

If you are familiar with SharePoint On-Prem versions there we have Site Definitions and Web Templates for stuff like this. But what can we do now in SharePoint Modern Sites times in a combination with SharePoint Online?

We have to learn something new – there we have Site Scripts and Site Designs for some specific common steps in creation process of our Web/Site Templates. What you could do with Site Scripts you could see on that link.
But scope of modifying with Site Scripts is a lil’bit small, so we have to take a look into alternatives.

In SharePoint world we have SharePoint PowerShell modules – so we could use PowerShell to modify our Modern Pages in SharePoint Online. But we want to make this happen automatically when new Web/Site was created -> so we want to make this happen with Web/Site Template.
That is possible only with Site Scripts and Site Designs. Fortunately we could connect our PowerShell scripts with Site Scripts and Site Designs via Microsoft Flow, which could call Azure Function App which contains PowerShell script.

But PnP team go further with PnP Provisioning Engine in their PnP PowerShell modules where you could easly specify Web/Site Template in one XML file and put it into your PowerShell script which is called from Site Scripts via Flow.

Let’s take a look into a simple example.