well, i'm pretty swamped and haven't had an opportunity to finish my template 101 whitepaper. i came across new uploads on the gotdotnet sharepoint samples and found a presentation from mikefitz regarding site definitions.
as some of you may know (what i was writing in my little whitepaper) is that frontpage editing breaks the ghosting of your template...here's an excerpt from the presentation (forgive the copy/paste formatting). check out the presentation and other stuff on the gotdotnet sharepoint space
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Pages and list schema are read from the site definition files
and cached at IIS process startup
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Page source is on the disk, not in the DB
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Pulled from the cache at runtime
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It still appears to be present in the site, hence the term “ghosted”
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Pages are only written to the database when customized within a site
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Browser-based customization (i.e. adding/removing web parts) does not change the actual ASPX pages, hence doesn’t unghost
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FrontPage customization often changes ASPX pages
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Maximizes scalability
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Reuse un-customized pages across sites
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Reduce unnecessary data storage and retrieval