So I decided to go with a Vanilla install of Umbraco. No runway. No nothin'. I created my own master pages, and everything was good. Until I tried the Edit in Canvas functionality.
It did nothing. Took me to a page with no toolbars, no editable areas, nothing. This is a horrible way to edit a page, I thought. I spent a good few hours figuring out what I had done and what I could do to get inline editing back into my setup. Here's what you need to do it.
Your main template must inherit from Default.master (there's some pretty important stuff in here)
If you're a guru, then you'll be able to strip-out what you need from default.master (which is on the file system, not in the DB) and put it in your master page. But why bother? Leave the guts there and have your master page inherit from it. It keeps things clean and pretty.
MasterPageFile ="~/umbraco/masterpages/default.master"
Throw everything in your main master page into the following content placeholder:
All of your content can go into this placeholder. DocType, HTML tags, etc.
You'll need a <form runat="server"> tag around your content areas.
I'd wrap the form directly around your Umbraco:Item content control reference, as any Umbraco:Item that's a string will become editable. That's not always a good thing. :)
That's it. Once I took those few things into account the canvas editing functionality worked like a charm.