This post is related to another recent post on creating pages using PowerShell and XML, but this time the focus is on creating sites (SPWebs, specifically :)) using PowerShell and XML input. I knew based on my prior experiences with creating Pages that XML was a nice, easy way to automate the tasks. Using the following XML syntax allowed me to put together what would work for my scenario:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Sites>
  <Site>
    <SiteTitle>My First Site</SiteTitle>
    <SiteUrl>http://intranet/myfirstsite</SiteUrl>
  </Site>
  <Site>
    <SiteTitle>My Second Site</SiteTitle>
    <SiteUrl>http://intranet/mysecondsite</SiteUrl>
  </Site>
<Sites>

Really pretty simple – right? Now I did have other settings for my Webs, but they were static across all of my sites (Template, for example) so I haven’t included them here. However, you could easily add additional tags and logic to apply different templates, locale IDs, etc…

Once I had the XML, creating the sites was VERY easy. It’s literally just 24 lines of PowerShell code, with the work coming from the ForEach-Object cmdlet. (Note: I excluded my typical comment-based help for ease of reading.)

Without further ado, here is the PoSh code!

function New-SPWebFromXml {
Param([string]$XmlInput)
# Read in list of sites from XML
[xml]$SitesXml = Get-Content $($XmlInput)
if ($SitesXml -eq $null) {return}
Start-SPAssignment -Global
$StartTime = Get-Date
# Loop through each site node to extract data
$SitesXml.Sites.Site | ForEach-Object {
$SiteTitle = [string]$_.SiteTitle
$SiteUrl = [string]$_.SiteUrl
$WebTemplate = "CMSPUBLISHING#0"
$LangId = "1033"
Write-Host "Creating an SPWeb at $($SiteUrl)"
New-SPWeb -Url $SiteUrl `
-Language $LangId `
-Template $WebTemplate `
-Name $SiteTitle
}
$EndTime = Get-Date
$TimeSpan = New-TimeSpan $StartTime $EndTime
Write-Host "$($SitesXml.Sites.Site.Count) sites created in $timespan"
Stop-SPAssignment -Global
}