Annoying SharePoint error about features and templates

Following a successful installation of SharePoint (WSS) and making a new web application using a content database restored from another server, this annoying error appeared when on one of the sites.

Feature ‘75a0fea7-2d1e-451a-b445-16bc346d78e’ for list template ‘1’ is not installed in this farm. The operation could not be completed.

I say “annoying” because it seemed really hard to fix — hence this blog post.

By Binging for that GUID, I could see that it was related to the BugList template. That made sense, because the site in question is focussed on that. But I couldn’t see how to get the BugList template working. Being a feature (from the error message), I figured it would help to run SharePoint.exe (the setup program) again, but the only options in there were Repair and Remove, neither of which was looking like helping. Running the “SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard” didn’t help either — there was nothing in there about features or templates.

A colleague pointed me to an application template download site, which helped, giving me a bunch of .stp and .wsp files, one of which was BugDatabase.wsp. Not BugList, not Bug Tracking, not Bug Tracker, but Bug Database. I should’ve taken a hint from here, but anyway.

A bit more Binging (and looking in the readme.txt that came with the download), and I found a page that told me how to install a .wsp file — I needed to use stsadm. But first I needed to install ApplicationTemplateCore.wsp. I wasn’t entirely convinced it was going to be the right solution, but I gave it a try.

“\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\BIN\stsadm.exe” —o addsolution —filename e:\AllTemplates\ApplicationTemplateCore.wsp

It didn’t work at first, but it turned out that I was copying the command line from a website, and it can’t’ve been recognising one of the spaces. I typed it in myself, and it worked first time.

There were more instructions on deploying the solution, but it turned out those instructions weren’t quite so useful, because when I went into the Central Administration site, in Operations, Solution Manager, I found that the deployment hadn’t been successful, despite stsadm telling me that it had been. So the next time I had to do this, I just added the solution with stsadm and then went straight to the Solution Manager, because I could deploy it from there.

In the Solution Manager, you click on the applicationtemplatecore.wsp entry and hit the “Deploy Solution” button. Hopefully it will work for you, as it did for me.

Terrific! Half way there.

Now I could do the same for BugDatabase.wsp.

“\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\BIN\stsadm.exe” —o addsolution —filename e:\AllTemplates\BugDatabase.wsp

..and go into Solution Manager to deploy it.

Now my site was up. But when I went into the Issues List, that was broken with a similar message, just a different GUID and template number.

Feature ‘60d1e34f-0eb3-4e56-9049-85daabfec68c’ for list template ‘1010’ is not installed in this farm. The operation could not be completed.

I could see this was a feature called pwsissues (thanks again Bing), but I couldn’t see a .wsp file that suggested anything. I hunted around for clues, even came across a discussion at West Michigan SharePoint User Group about it. It didn’t really help much though, I was still hunting around trying to figure out what I had to do. I felt it should be similar to my previous problem, so in desperation I started adding .wsp files indiscriminately.

And it worked! I should’ve tried this earlier, remembering that BugDatabase.wsp wasn’t called BugTracking.wsp. To get the Issues Tracking template in, I needed to add (and deploy) the solution called ProjectTrackingWorkspace.wsp.

Once I had done that, my errors disappeared, and I breathed a big sigh of relief.

I quite like SharePoint — it’s a very useful tool for many reasons. I guess I just haven’t had quite enough SharePoint _admin_ experience. But now I have a blog post to refer to if I come across this error again.