Multisite: creating a site copy

Is there any work, or consideration for future release regarding having an option to make duplicates of page templates when creating a template of an existing site in multisite ?

The use case is SiteA has a couple dozen/hundred pages, carefully designed and using half-a-dozen page templates. The page templates have site specific content for SiteA.

SiteB is created by doing a copy of SiteA, and all the pages are copied over, but share SiteA's page templates, so trying to put SiteB specific content in a template, also shows up in SiteA, or removing SiteA specific content from the template, affects both sites...

So now the purpose of having the templates is defeated because they can no longer be used to put in content that is shared across a set of pages...

Hi Ernesto,

Thank you for contacting us.

The ability to duplicate page templates is available to you in Sitefinity 7.3. We have had a feature request that is now done for this specific functionality. Also Page Templates are not able to Sync via the Site Synchronization module.

However, your case is a bit different and it has to deal with this request. Basically you would like the sync to not alter the templates between sites so that they remain per site. This is still not implemented. We will do our best to include this feature in our future releases.

Regards,
Ivan D. Dimitrov
Telerik

Thank you Ivan for the response.

Just to clarify, I am not involving siteSync here yet, just multisite functionality, where it would be ideal to have the option to:

when creating a new website based on another website, that a new set of templates is duplicated and used on the new website, as opposed to what currently happens where the templates are shared.

 As to not end in the situation where we had a site of US, made a copy of it for Australia, and then another copy for Canada.

The US website had a bunch of US-site-specific links in site footer (in the template used by all the pages in the US website), 

Since the template is now shared across the three websites, now we do not have the ability to change the footer as it affects the three websites, in fact the footer is "broken" for the two other websites because it has US-specific links...

The options... create the new templates, go to every page on the other websites and switch the templates. This is work that was not expected but came out of this side-effect.

Another annoyance, users are duplicating pages between sites, and templates are crossing site boundaries to other sites where they not necessarily work well... More of a user training/education effort...

Hello Ernesto,

As mentioned in my previous reply we do have this request logged in our Portal. We will do our best in order to add this functionality in our future releases.

I realise that it is bothersome to have new page templates  for each site in your multisite instance. For the time being this is the only way to achieve this. Feel free to use the Duplicate function in order to alleviate the process.

Regards,
Ivan D. Dimitrov
Telerik