Custom site template is messing native templates

Question

I'm creating some site site collections using this command :

$url = http://somewhere/sites/coll
$me = "${env:userdomain}\${env:username}"
$email = "${env:username}@corp.com"
STSADM.EXE -o createsite -url $url -owneremail $email -ownerlogin $me -sitetemplate sps#0

(Yes, I don't use the PowerShell New-SPSite command because of some weird PowerShell caching issues).

This command is working as expected.

Now, I deploy a custom WSP Package that contains a lot of stuffs: custom site definitions, content types, webparts, template files, etc.

After I deploy this package, the former command stopped to works, with the following error message :

The parent content type specified by content type identifier 0x0101 does not exist.

Please, note that I'm still trying to create a SPS#0 site (not my custom one) !

Diving into the logs, I can see some weird messages :

03/07/2013 10:21:43.31  STSADM.EXE (0x188C) 0x14EC  SharePoint Foundation   General 761k    Medium  Failed to get all (feature-driven) content types.  This web front-end is not joined to the farm.    
03/07/2013 10:21:43.31  STSADM.EXE (0x188C) 0x14EC  SharePoint Foundation   General 72i7    High    Failed to get the content type elements.    
03/07/2013 10:21:43.31  STSADM.EXE (0x188C) 0x14EC  SharePoint Foundation   General 88z9    High    #5008a: La clé donnée était absente du dictionnaire.    
03/07/2013 10:21:43.31  STSADM.EXE (0x188C) 0x14EC  SharePoint Foundation   General 88z9    High    (#-2146232969: La clé donnée était absente du dictionnaire.)    
03/07/2013 10:21:43.33  STSADM.EXE (0x188C) 0x14EC  SharePoint Foundation   General 761k    Medium  Failed to get all (feature-driven) content types.  This web front-end is not joined to the farm.    
03/07/2013 10:21:43.33  STSADM.EXE (0x188C) 0x14EC  SharePoint Foundation   General 72i7    High    Failed to get the content type elements.    
03/07/2013 10:21:43.33  STSADM.EXE (0x188C) 0x14EC  SharePoint Foundation   General 88z9    High    #5008a: La clé donnée était absente du dictionnaire.

Does anyone have seen similar issue? Where should I look at to solve this issue?

Answer 1

Incredible.

I unblock the situation by adding Overwrite="TRUE" to all content type I define in my solution.

I can explain why, but without this attribute, the global content type catalog was messy.

If anyone can explain, I'll be happy to have an explanation.

Answer 2

I had the same problem, with the same solution.

I don't know which custom site content type in my VS project caused the problem - I think they had all been working. I added another one and everything broke. Removing the last one I had added didn't fix anything. I had to change them all to Overwrite=TRUE. I think this is related to orphaned ctypes in the content database (my central admin health analyzer is throwing up errors about that).

Another post suggested activating the CTYPES web feature (695b6570-a48b-4a8e-8ea5-26ea7fc1d162) with powershell and using the -force parameter. However it was already activated.. Using disable-feature and then enable-spfeature didn't change anything. The vast majority of site content types were still missing (including Item, Document, Event...).

The first time I saw this problem, I corrected it by removing the last ctype I had added to the feature. (I had a site content type that was in two features at once, intentionally.)