may not a wise choice. I was tasked with creating two site templates via .stp files; one that would be used to create a site collection and a second that would be used to create a child site of the site collection.
I developed the hierarchy of sites in SharePoint so we could demo the sites for our internal personnel and figured that I could just export the two sites as .stp files, install them into Site Admin template library, create the sites and be done.
Using this blog, I installed the .stp files so they appeared in Central Admin when creating a new site collection. The Board of Dirs template is a template that came as part of the Fab 40. That was the one that I used to create my site collection.
The issue came after I created the site collection and tried to access some web parts from the web part gallery.
Sure enough, if I go into the Web Part Gallery (Site Actions -> Site Settings -> Web Parts) for that site, it is empty.
Next step is to try using a site definition to create the base site and trying to use a .stp file to create the child site to see if that fixes the issue. I will keep you posted on the results.
