I have our old 2007 intranet upgraded to 2010 via database attach. It's in its own web application and I want to move some of the sites over to our production web application.

I'm using a script that will export the site from the imported collection, create a new site in the new collection and then import the site into it. Needless to say this breaks unless the web templates are the same.

I was thinking of moving the lists over one-by-one into a new site. Has anyone tried this already? Will it work at all if they're not from the same site tempalte?


Moving them over one by one will work, since it doesn't matter what the template is, it isn't looking for web parts and page layouts. You will probably have to move them as list templates with the content, though.


As Lori said, the template shouldn't matter, but if you have any larger libraries you'll probably quickly hit the limit of size for a creating a template with the content (unless you've changed that value).

Is there a particular reason why you need/want to move them one by one? There's a few easier ways to do this. You could use STSADM or PowerShell to create a site backup, then restore that backup file to a new URL on the production web application.

You could also use PowerShell to move the web using something like the script mentioned here.

  • I've developed a nice powershell script which will export then import sites, check if they alerady exist and so on. My sites are on different web applications. The trouble is that some of the source sites have funny templates or require features I don't want to activate on the target web application. So I was wondering if there's an established method (with scripts that I can rip off) before I write my own. – Dan May 18 '11 at 7:04
  • If the sites/webs include require features those features will have to be active on the target web application. To avoid broken functionality you'd want to disable/remove those features from the sites before you move them. – webdes03 May 18 '11 at 13:11

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