SharePoint 2010 Template using both Default and Custom Masterpage problem

Question

I have created a site based on the standard blog site, with the following changes:

1. I created two new master pages; default.master (set as default) and custom.master (set as custom).
2. I pointed a number of pages (such as default.aspx) to the default.master page
3. I then modified some of the list forms to point to the custom.master page

This all works very well, and as expected.

Now, I have saved this site as a template with which I can generate new sites from. However, when I create a new site from this template, this new site seems to set default.master as both the Default and Custom master page. How can I get the template to correctly remember which of the master pages should be set to default, and which is set to custom?

Answer 1

Turns out that when I was saving a site as a template, SharePoint forgot to put the CustomMasterUrl attribute into the configuration section of the ONet.xml file.

I had to export the site template (as a WSP file) and import that file into Visual Studio 2010. Then I added the missing attribute, so the full string was as follows:

<Configuration ID="0" Name="Default" MasterUrl="_catalogs/masterpage/default.master" CustomMasterUrl="_catalogs/masterpage/custom.master" ThemedCssFolderUrl="">

I then published a new WSP file and uploaded it to the SharePoint solution gallery. Now new sites generated from my template behave correctly.