R – custom site definition template wss 3.0

Check if your site template is available to be used in subsites by clicking on Site Actions -> Site Settings -> Page Layouts and Site Templates (under the Look and Feel category).

From there if you choose the option "Subsites can only use the following site templates" see if your template is listed and make it available if possible. It should then appear in the selection.

If that doesn't work let me know mate as there is another solution to this which I can look up.

Cheers

My first thought was: Why in the onet.xml?

I usually do this using a process called Feature stapling. It is impossible to remove / disable functionality created from a site definition later on (off course you could by hand, or a feature + receiver to remove say a list you don't need for a particular site created from the onet.xml, but you probably get the point).

By using feature stapling, (your / the) site definition stays clean and stays what it is meant to be: a definition of a site, that can be selected during site creation. IMHO, it should be nothing more than an empty container.

Feature Stapling binds features you want activated when a site is created to a (custom) siteTEMPLATE. You can even use this to attach features you want activated on out of the box site definitions as well. For instance, feature stapling is the preferred way of enabling features in the "MySite" and "My Site Host" definitions. The original sitedefintion remains untouched, but your features are activated too!

Now to actually answer your question: The masterpage is probably not available yet when the site definition is used, the onet.xml is processed before any features are activated.

If your site is a publishing site (meaning the publishing related features are activated in the site collection), you can set the masterpage in the Publishing Feature with the ChromeMasterUrl property.

If the site is a regular site, you can do 2 things:

• deploy the master page from the onet.xml by moving the <Module> from your masterpage feature to the onet.xml, more info here (figure 1).
• don't set the masterpage url in the onet, but use a feature + featurereceiver to set the masterpage url, more info here (downloadable code in article).