Masterpages and Page layouts list/page not working

Question

Greetings

I think I messed up. In the project I'm working on I made a Module adding some PageLayouts to the Masterpages and Page layouts library through it. After deploying the solution the Masterpages and Page layouts now fails. When I click the link in Site Settings, it fails. But if I write the url straight into the URL bar in my browsers, it shows it perfectly.

One of my PageLayouts was named Default.aspx. First I thought that I might had overwritten one of the existing neccesary pagelayout files with that, but as I looked through all my other websites, non of them had Default.aspx, only DefaultLayout.aspx.

I have no idea of why else this happened. My guess is that it's the Redirect.aspx page which is failing hard, but I have literally no idea of why this happened.

Has anyone faced this issue beforehand? I couldn't find anything on google or other search engines.

Answer 1

Answer

I found the solution to my problem. I looked closely through my Sharepoint logfiles and discovered that it kept refering to my custom "Default.aspx" page, so I tried deleting it and now it all works.

Answer 2

If this url fails: http://server/_Layouts/RedirectPage.aspx?Target={SiteCollectionUrl}_catalogs/masterpage

But this url works fine: http://server/_catalogs/masterpage

It sounds like the problem is with the redirect page.

Can you see if this link to the webpart gallery also fails? http://server/_Layouts/RedirectPage.aspx?Target={SiteCollectionUrl}_catalogs/wp

If you are not getting an error message, but no page is displayed, then check the SharePoint log file for the error.

Answer 3

If you can get to the settings page, reset your master page back to one of the system generated ones. If that works, then you know the problem is in your master page and not your layouts. If pages still do not display even after resetting to a known good master page then you probably have something wrong in your layout.

If you cannot even get into the UI to reset the master page, try doing it via PowerShell.

You will be able to do additional troubleshooting / testing once you get your site working again.

Answer 4

SharePoint Designer is another good way to troubleshoot this. You can reset the master page, preview any site page in the browser, create new pages for a specific master page and then test it with preview without having to change the default master page mappings, etc.