I have some custom SharePoint site definitions that are deployed via SharePoint wsp solution packages. They appear to work fine. I can deploy them fine via the stsadm command line, and my C# code running in some features can also deploy sites based on them. My webtemp.*.xml files appear to be correctly placed in the 12\1033\XML folder when my solutions are deployed. My problem is that they just don't show up in the central admin app when I try to Create Site Collection. Why not? I don't even know where to look for this.
EDIT:
Hmmm.. About an hour later I happened to go back to the create site collection page and my templates were there. I'm not sure what was up… weird caching somewhere or something.
I also should have been more clear that these solution packages had been successfully deployed many times on my dev box, so I didn't expect there to be a problem (with the deployment aspect anyway) on this other server.
Best Answer
Many tasks in SharePoint are queued and then executed via timer job. An IISReset causes the web applicationt to be reloaded into memory and for configuration information for example the web.config to be reloaded.
To give SharePoint a "nudge" and cause jobs to execute you might try: