Magento custom theme/package CSS not working after enabling SSL

Question

Im having trouble with Magento not displaying our custom package/theme after setting up SSL security. I had just moved everything from our testing site, to the live site, and afterwards the template was loading fine. However, when I enabled secure URLs on frontend and backend, and changed the Secure Base URL, the store will not load the custom theme anymore - even if I disable Secure URLs. If I change theme to "default" or another theme, it seems to load ok. Its just when I use my custom theme. I've flushing the cache and reindexing a few times, but it doesn't seem to have any effect. I've verified that the custom theme folder is still there and checked that the owner/group and permissions were the same as the test site, but still no luck.

When my custom theme is selected, the site looks like CSS is not loading. If I check the source, I can see that it is trying to pull the styles.css from /skin/frontend/base/default/css/styles.css instead of from /skin/frontend/MyPackage/default/dist/css/style.css Other themes load the css ok though.

Any help is much appreciated.

UPDATE: I put the store into Developer Mode and now I can see this error:

Warning: simplexml_load_string(): Entity: line 112: parser error : Opening and ending tag mismatch: remove line 88 and reference  in /var/www/scales.net/httpdocs/app/code/core/Mage/Core/Model/Layout/Update.php on line 444

#0 [internal function]: mageCoreErrorHandler(2, 'simplexml_load_...', '/var/www/scales...', 444, Array)
#1 /var/www/scales.net/httpdocs/app/code/core/Mage/Core/Model/Layout/Update.php(444): simplexml_load_string('getFileLayoutUpdatesXml('frontend', 'scalesnet', 'default', '1')
#3 /var/www/scales.net/httpdocs/app/code/core/Mage/Core/Model/Layout/Update.php(347): Mage_Core_Model_Layout_Update->fetchFileLayoutUpdates()
#4 /var/www/scales.net/httpdocs/app/code/core/Mage/Core/Model/Layout/Update.php(246): Mage_Core_Model_Layout_Update->fetchPackageLayoutUpdates('default')
#5 /var/www/scales.net/httpdocs/app/code/core/Mage/Core/Model/Layout/Update.php(224): Mage_Core_Model_Layout_Update->merge('default')
#6 /var/www/scales.net/httpdocs/app/code/core/Mage/Core/Controller/Varien/Action.php(306): Mage_Core_Model_Layout_Update->load()
#7 /var/www/scales.net/httpdocs/app/code/core/Mage/Catalog/controllers/CategoryController.php(137): Mage_Core_Controller_Varien_Action->loadLayoutUpdates()
#8 /var/www/scales.net/httpdocs/app/code/core/Mage/Core/Controller/Varien/Action.php(418): Mage_Catalog_CategoryController->viewAction()
#9 /var/www/scales.net/httpdocs/app/code/core/Mage/Core/Controller/Varien/Router/Standard.php(250): Mage_Core_Controller_Varien_Action->dispatch('view')
#10 /var/www/scales.net/httpdocs/app/code/core/Mage/Core/Controller/Varien/Front.php(172): Mage_Core_Controller_Varien_Router_Standard->match(Object(Mage_Core_Controller_Request_Http))
#11 /var/www/scales.net/httpdocs/app/code/core/Mage/Core/Model/App.php(354): Mage_Core_Controller_Varien_Front->dispatch()
#12 /var/www/scales.net/httpdocs/app/Mage.php(684): Mage_Core_Model_App->run(Array)
#13 /var/www/scales.net/httpdocs/index.php(87): Mage::run('', 'store')
#14 {main}

Can you check what method is used to include your css in your custom theme ? In custom themes we often tend to include scripts with base_url() method rather than skin or media url. Kindly get back on the method used to include. This may be the problem if i'm not wrong — StormBr34ker
The CSS is added using the local.xml file inside my themes layout folder. The theme is based on the bootstrap Boilerplate template here: github.com/webcomm/magento-boilerplate — Onyx
Its as if the local.xml isn't even being loaded though, because all of the blocks I removed are back (like the dog callout) and none of the CSS and JS that were imported by the xml are there. — Onyx
Okay here is a suggestion. Refresh you cache for static files in cache management in magento. And if you are minimizing the js and css using the developer setting in magento, try to refresh that cache as well. Let me know what happens when you do this .. — StormBr34ker
I've tried flushing the local cache, and the servers cache but still no go. I just tried setting the store to dev mode and now get an error at least. I have added the error to my original post. — Onyx

Onyx Onyx · Accepted Answer · 2014-08-15T14:04:27

The problem was, like Sumuga suggested, an unclosed tag in the XML file. There was also an issue with the https rewrite URLS not working (like checkout), but it was unrelated to the XML issue.

Magento custom theme/package CSS not working after enabling SSL

1 Answers