I asked about customizing the default page on space creation.
Charles noted that it can be done, but by changing confluencd.cfg.xml.

Access to the filesystem can often be much more difficult than admin
web-access. So I'd prefer be able to set a "new space" template from the Admin Web
UI.

And since we tend to have a couple categories of spaces (ex. Team,
Project).. I'd like to have multiple default pages to select from when
creating the space.

Oh, and I'd like to have it all exposed via the API so I could automate
the process of space request/creation.

Nick M. noted some good reasons why storing in the filesystem would be less preferable:
> The problem with the filesystem approach is
> a) its often not easy to get access to the filesystem (firewalls, etc)
> b) you have to start giving out os/filesystem permissions on top of
> confluence permissioning - its extra overhead.
> c) its not transactional (not trivially, anyway)
> d) its a big barrier to clustering (having to share a
> filesystem is very
> expensive - as well as being quite limiting)
> e) the versioning isnt integrated, and also a pita (I assume
> you mean using
> cvs...)
> f) its a PITA when you have to move between staging and live
> (you have a
> filesystem dependancy in addition to the EAR)
>
> In short, in our environment, we are very small fans of using the
> filesystem for storing data (we leave that work to the database)
>
> -Nick
>