I am really shocked that this doesn't exist. I've always worked in an environment where I used IIS websites explicitly for multiple full blown websites and always prefixed the urls with a subdomain for a particular service/s i.e. api or web etc. But I am now in a situation where I absolutely have to do this.. Surely this can't be this hard to do? I'll just have to use the dummy package. deployment method

Making the package deploy step a feature that could be opted into would definitely make this step template a lot more useful.
In addition to creating a parent site without needing a dummy package deployed we have an unfortunate need to create a web application that points to the same place on disk as another site and with the required package deploy we either need to deploy the same package an additional time on the server to a new location or re-deploy it on top of the already deployed location. Either option creates duplicate maintenance points

Four years ... think it'll ever happen?

+1! Absolutely need this for how we deploy our internal api services.

This really is a must. We use a parent site to deploy all our customers under

We need this as well

This would be a great feature to avoid deploying the same package multiple times.
I was trying to follow the steps here:
https://help.octopusdeploy.com/discussions/questions/10050-deploy-multiple-iis-web-sites-from-a-single-package

However, the templates in the library are not nearly as feature rich as the one provided by Octopus itself.

I'm surprised this feature isn't already available. Creating a parent website is a fundamental requirement for many IIS projects.

I'd prefer to have a more robust solution based on the IIS step (but without it being tied to deploying a package, of course). Why don't you create a separate step to just create an IIS site and add that to your standard steps? Or even better: Remove the requirement of deploying a package from the IIS step altogether? You already have a standard step to deploy a package, so why also tie that requirement it to the IIS step? That would make a lot of sense to me and make the whole process a lot more flexible and suitable for enterprise usage.

I would also find this very useful. We deploy web applications below an existing website, that is just used to host those applications.

Yes please. The community packages for IIS website creation don't support multiple bindings

I need this

Pretty good argument from a user in favor of this feature:

"Before 3.4.7, we did use the step templates in library to create web site and web application. However, the templates in library are not like "Deploy an IIS Web Site" with a more friendly UI and also allowing us to specify more settings in IIS, such as multiple IIS bindings. So, that's why we used "Deploy an IIS Web Site" from 3.4.7."