Site Pages in Non-Team Sites

The problem:

I am creating a site from my site collection feature receiver; the site is not a team site, but it does need to have the Site Pages library. You might recall that on every team site this library is automatically provisioned, because of  the WikiPageHomePage feature; however, the problem is that this feature cannot be activated in non-team sites.

The solution:

Since I have to activate the feature in code, the best way to do it is to obtain the reference to the site that is being created and then call the EnsureSitePagesLibrary():

SPWeb web = ...
SPList list = web.Lists.EnsureSitePagesLibrary();

Note that, in a similar fashion, you can provision a Site Assets library in a non-team site - just call EnsureSiteAssetsLibrary(), rather than EnsureSitePagesLibrary().