Page templates disappeared with Wordpress 3.4

6
votes

I've created a Wordpress theme that uses several custom page templates. As per the documentation http://codex.wordpress.org/Pages#Creating_Your_Own_Page_Templates I've accomplished this simply by setting a comment at the top of my template-files:

/* Template Name: MyCustomTemplate */

And it's worked fine for as long as I can remember (it's not the first time I use custom page templates). Today we updated to Wodrpress 3.4 and suddenly the option to select a custom template has disappeared from the admin (it used to be a drop-down in the "Page Attributes" box to the right). However, if you use the "Quick Edit" in the list of pages the "Template" drop-down is still visible, but you can only select "Default template" - none of the custom templates that I've set up.

According to this blog post: http://nacin.com/2012/03/29/page-templates-in-subdirectories-new-in-wordpress-3-4/ WP 3.4 has added support for custom page templates inside a sub-directory, but it's unclear whether this directory needs to be named something special or if you still need the "Template Name"-comment at the top of the files. I've tried creating a "pages"-directory and first put an empty .php-file in it but that did nothing. I then tried putting one of my custom page templates (complete with the "Template Name"-comment) in there but that didn't help either.

It's worth noting that the pages that were already assigned to use a custom page template still render with that template - even though it says "Default template" in "Quick Edit" and there are no other templates available in the drop-down.

There's almost nothing to be found on the interwebs yet but I'm hoping one of you will know what's going on.

3
wordpresswordpress-theming

3 Answers

13
votes

Well we figured it out. Apparently from 3.4 the "Template Name"-comment needs to look like this:

/*
    Template Name: MyCustomTemplate
*/

And it won't show up in the admin if it looks like this:

/* Template Name: MyCustomTemplate */

Hope this helps somebody else.

Edit: "Wordpress" emailed us and said this is a bug that will be fixed with the next version.

0
votes

Phew, big project on the line, was scared there for a minute! I'm not sure about sub-directory templates but as the last person commented, having a line break before and after the template name ( having /* and */ on its own line) did the trick.

On the site I was working on there were 4 main templates for different communities that included different headers and navigation. When the custom templates broke, all that happened was the drop down menu to choose a specific template disappeared. The website functionality did not get disturbed, and all pages kept using the correct template. Updating the template files in dreamweaver fixed the dropdown selector.

0
votes

In wordpress 3.4.2 following code breaked template selectbox in my theme:

add_filter('stylesheet', 'theme_stylesheet');
function theme_stylesheet() {
    return 'img';
}