site features causing issues while creating site from my custom template

Question

I created site template by saving it from a minor customized blog site. I exported it in VS2010 and created a custom web template. Im seeing few site feature references along with some web features in its onet.xml.

After making the required changes, I

a. deployed my solution in one of my web apps of my farm

b. created a site collection from BLANK site template in that web app.

c. activated my web template related features in my site collection

d. Once I tried to create a sub site based on my Custom Web Tempplate, Im seeing the errors like "<GUID> feature not found"

How to resolve this???

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

Hi,

1. Is it possible that your original site has come custom feature deployed to it, and your destination farm has no such feature installed? If that's the case, please deploy the same feature to your new farm too.

2. What do you see in ULS log? does it provide more infomation about this error?

3. Try search FEATURES folder with that GUID you got from error message. see if it is a out-of-the-box feature that you are missing.

First, which feature (name, custom or OOTB) has that GUID, then you should be able to resolve your issue fast. Please provide us more detail about what your finding.

Hope is helps

James

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Please mark as Answered if it helped you
James Tsai | SharePoint Consultant | MCPD,MCTS | www.jamestsai.net

Answer 2

In addition to James his third item, a Technet article with a worksheet which contains all the GUIDs of the out-of-the-box features:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh801868.aspx

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- Dennis | Netherlands | Blog | Twitter

Answer 3

The issue is due to the need of a manual activation of features referred in the Site Feature section of Web Template Onet.XML. All the features refered in Web Features section of  web template will get activated autoamtically when a site is created using that template but the site features have to activated manually.

I suggest to

Remove the unwanted feature references from the Site Features section of Web Template.

Activate the required site features in a site collection feature prior to the web template based site creation.