Save as Template Bug - Ouch!
OK, this one is a nasty one! I recently built out a MOSS portal and leveraged site templates to build out a number of sites. That's what they're there for, right? Oddly, when I went to test a discussion thread on one of the new sites, things didn't work. I clicked on a topic and expected to see the details on that topic. Instead, the page refreshed. It appeared that the hyperlink for the topic was set to default.aspx (when it should have been flat.aspx). After some troubleshooting, I exchanged emails with Daniel Cohen-Dumani. He informed me of a bug that he has seen with the 'Save as Template' (an apparent regression from Beta 2 to RTM). Basically, the custom views set on web parts are lost when the site is saved as a template. Ouch!
Daniel just posted details... http://www.portalsolutions.net/Blog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=17. Try it for yourself; it's true! I haven't seen any other mention of this issue (but I'm sure I will!). Hopefully, Microsoft gets this fixed with a patch. In the interim, I'll take Daniel’s advice about making the necessary changes in the base template to work around this.
Fun, fun, fun!