SharePoint Config

Ari Bakker's thoughts on customising and configuring SharePoint

MOSS Site Templates Not Compatible With WSS

with 12 comments

Something that I wasn’t aware of until now is the fact that if you save a site template in MOSS 2007 it will not work in WSS 3.0.

I found this out the hard way when trying to create a site in WSS based on a template I had created in MOSS. The template uploaded fine but when I tried to create a site I received the following error:

The template you have chosen is invalid or cannot be found.

After further investigation I found that even saving a blank site in MOSS as a site template will give the same error when uploaded into WSS 3.0. In the end I re-created the site template using WSS 3.0 which seems to work fine on MOSS. I guess this makes sense since MOSS is built on WSS, but the error wasn’t entirely intuitive.

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Written by Ari Bakker

May 29th, 2007 at 10:46 am

Posted in Errors,Templates

12 Responses to 'MOSS Site Templates Not Compatible With WSS'

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  1. Thank you…

    rüya tabiri

    26 Nov 08 at 5:22 pm

  2. in my case I also had to delete the <SiteFeatures> node in the manifest.xml

    I use cab maker to create the cab files easily:
    http://www.tonysfreeware.com/download.htm

    Sjoerd

    22 Sep 08 at 11:05 am

  3. I got that same error, but after struggling for ages I found I needed to have all the features of the site that I copied enabled on my target site. That solved it for me.

    Morgan

    15 Feb 08 at 11:19 am

  4. I received the same error message under different circumstances. In my case I was creating a new Site Definition by copying an existing site definition and modifying the XML.

    I learned that you need to be very careful to avoid conflicts with IDs already used in Windows SharePoint Services. It is suggested to use UNIQUE values greater than 10,000 for the ID attribute.

    In my case my XML looked like this:

    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
    <Templates xmlns:ows="Microsoft SharePoint">
    <Template Name="SAMPLE" ID="10001">
    <Configuration ID="0" Title="Sample Site" Hidden="FALSE" ImageUrl="/_layouts/images/stsprev.png" Description="Blah blah blah." DisplayCategory="Custom Site Definitions" > </Configuration>
    </Template>
    </Templates>

    By changing the ID to 10004 the problem went away. I didn't realize, or had forgotten, that I had used the ID of 10001 previously for another template. My correct XML was:

    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
    <Templates xmlns:ows="Microsoft SharePoint">
    <Template Name="SAMPLE" ID="10004">
    <Configuration ID="0" Title="Sample Site" Hidden="FALSE" ImageUrl="/_layouts/images/stsprev.png" Description="Blah blah blah." DisplayCategory="Custom Site Definitions" > </Configuration>
    </Template>
    </Templates>

    The next template I create will have an ID of 10005, the one after that 10006, etc…….

    Michael

    8 Nov 07 at 2:59 pm

  5. Hi Guys,

    Just stumbled across the same problem, found a workaround though. The following outlines the process of removing the features WSS does not support.

    1) Rename the stp to a cab file, extract the files.
    2) Open manifest.xml
    3) Remove the nodes WorkflowAssociations
    4) Export a site template from the WSS site, extract mainfest.xml and copy the WebFeatures element (and its children) into the MOSS manifest.xml file (by replacing the existing).
    5) Package the item up again, and upload to the site.

    The majority of elements work, you may have some qwirks in views not displaying. I've found that resaving these items fixes the problem.

    Hope this helps.

    Andrew Backway

    28 Aug 07 at 5:12 am

  6. To save a site as a template simply navigate to 'Site Settings > Look and Feel – Save Site as Template'. If the option does not show up on the site settings page you can browse to http://siteurl/_layouts/savetmpl.aspx to get to the save template page.

    Ari Bakker

    5 Aug 07 at 4:09 am

  7. I think there are lot of very interesting uses for the Telerik UI controls (and similar ASP.NET controls from Infragistics and Component Art). I spoke with Andrew Connell at TechEd and he is writing a whitepaper on how to use their various controls with SharePoint 2007 and it should be coming out shortly.

    Brent

    5 Jul 07 at 4:07 am

  8. In my case adding all the features from the original site solved the issue. For some reason I was stupid enough to think they would migrate together with site template 🙂

    Wiktor

    5 Aug 09 at 11:56 am

  9. Eywallah kardes…

  10. emm… love it ))

    Occurobub

    22 Apr 09 at 1:02 pm

  11. Thanks

    granit

    14 Mar 09 at 8:00 pm

  12. […] I received the ‘The template you have chosen is invalid or cannot be found’. Unlike a MOSS to WSS conversion the problem here is that the features do exist on the server but are simply not available for the […]

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