I think "portfolio" is too generic (plus I think a
pretty substantial fraction of the people that heard
the name would think it does something different than
it does).
One other thing you might want to look at is the
stuff we did in london for using install.xml templates for subsite
creation. There is an example in the community of practice code with how this works.
install.xml
and the place it's called (look for apm::process_install_xml).