Deploying Site Templates in the Solution Gallery

Case
I downloaded a couple of site templates from the Solution Gallary of my SharePoint Portal.

I want to put these site templates in a Solution Package so I can easily deploy them in my development enviroments.

I just want to deploy the solution, go to my site collection and greate the subpages I need.

Problem
After putting the file in the correct location (_catalogs/solutions) in my site collection, I noticed I couldn't activate the templates. Activating the templates is necessary to be able to select the template while creating a new site.

Solution
The following solution turned out to work for me:

- Create a new Module in VS2010.
- Add the site templates to your Module.

[Module Name="Templates" List="121" Url="_catalogs/solutions"]
[File Path="Templates\Template_Name.wsp" Url="Template_Name.wsp" Type="GhostableInLibrary"]
[Property Name="ContentType" Value="Solution Gallery" /]
[Property Name="SolutionTitle" Value="Template Name" /]
[Property Name="SolutionDescription" Value="Standard Template" /]
[/File]
[/Module]

* Replace [ and ] signs with less than (<) and greater than (>) signs.

- Add an eventreceiver to the feature and uncomment 'FeatureActivated'

SPSite currentSite = (SPSite)properties.Feature.Parent;

// Get all names of added solutions
List solutionName = new List();
SPUserSolutionCollection solutionsCollection = currentSite.Solutions;

foreach (SPUserSolution solution in currentSite.Solutions)
{
string name = solution.Name;
if (!solutionName.Contains(name))
{
solutionName.Add(name);
}
}

// Add new solutions to the collection of the gallery
SPDocumentLibrary solutionsGallery = (SPDocumentLibrary)currentSite.GetCatalog(SPListTemplateType.SolutionCatalog);
foreach (SPListItem item in solutionsGallery.Items)
{
if (!solutionName.Contains(item.Name))
{
solutionsCollection.Add(item.ID);
}
}

// Properly activate solutions
SPFeatureCollection featureCollection = currentSite.Features;
foreach (SPUserSolution solution in solutionsCollection)
{
Guid solutionId = solution.SolutionId;

SPFeatureDefinitionCollection siteFeatures = currentSite.FeatureDefinitions;

var features = from SPFeatureDefinition f in siteFeatures
where f.SolutionId.Equals(solutionId) && f.Scope == SPFeatureScope.Site
select f;

foreach (SPFeatureDefinition featureDefinition in features)
{
SPFeature foundFeature = featureCollection[featureDefinition.Id];

if (foundFeature == null)
currentSite.Features.Add(featureDefinition.Id, false, SPFeatureDefinitionScope.Site);
}
}