Ever came across that situation where you just saved an existing list as a template? And then you tried creating a new list based on that template? No matter how hard you looked, you just couldn’t find the template saved earlier when trying to create a new list?
Chances are that your list was provisioned using a feature and that the Hidden property of the <ListTemplate> element was set to True. That property prevents the list template from showing up on the page where you create a new list. Unfortunately, this also makes it a little bit more difficult to create that list through the SharePoint user interface.
Yes, I said a little more difficult, not impossible. There happens to be a work-around that allows you to still perform that action through the UI. This little trick was inspired on something that worked in SharePoint Portal Server 2003 as well. Sometimes the UI doesn’t allow you to perform a certain action (for example, it hides the action). However, the page that performs the actual action, could be fooled in performing the hidden action, by passing the correct query string parameters.
In this case, we will do exactly the same thing to create our list. Navigate to the site where you want to create your list and go to View All Site Content. On that page, click the Create button. As you already found out, the template you just saved isn’t here. Now, click the link to create a new Custom List.
Notice the address bar in your browser. The new.aspx page takes a FeatureId and ListTemplate as a parameter. The FeatureId parameter matches with the feature which installed this list on the SharePoint environment. The ListTemplate parameter probably speaks for itself; it specifies the template ID of the list.
To create a list based on a saved template, you need to specify an additional parameter to new.aspx. This parameter is called NewPageFilename and its value should be the name of your STP file.
Now you should look up the feature that installed the list you’re trying to create and copy its ID. Take this value and replace the value for FeatureId in the query string. Also, look up the <ListTemplate> element that is defined in the feature and copy its Type attribute. This value corresponds with the ListTemplate parameter in the URL, so replace the value in the query string with the value you just copied.
When you’re done, your URL should look something like this (without the square brackets):
/_layouts/new.aspx?NewPageFilename=[YourTemplateName]%2Estp&FeatureId={735DE88F-B6C1-4571-8D5F-08BF22D6CF40}&ListTemplate=130185
There you go! This URL should allow you to create your list. Navigate to the URL above and fill out the form like you normally do and you’re done 
This trick probably also works with hidden lists that don’t have a saved template. In that case, just omit the NewPageFilename parameter.
