Earlier this week at work I was building a news section for Umbraco. Nothing fancy, just a news document type that extended my base page doc type by adding a teaser, a news date and a few other fields. I then wrote some XSL to pull the latest three items to show on the homepage as well as a list of items to show on the main news page. All was dandy, except when I published my news items. They were blank. :(
After doing some digging I found a useful ditty to place at the end of the page URL for the purpose of debugging:
?umbDebugShowTrace=true
This guy gave me a debug trace for the page. Now I hope that this doesn't work when debug is set to false in the web.config. I should probably test that out, but at the moment I'm feeling pretty lazy. ;)
I noticed right away that I was getting some sort of recursive error. A master page referencing itself? Not on my watch! I had no master pages referencing themselves, so I checked the news content nodes and noticed that their templates weren't set. Once I set them to the news template and re-published them all was well. I'm still not sure why not having a template set would convince Umbraco that the master page was referencing itself, but that's a battle for another day.
One thing to note was that under my Settings section for the News document type I didn't have a default template selected in the drop-down list. This resulted in new news pages not having the template associated with them.