Last night i installed a new theme to this blog of mine and after setting basic things up when i went to edit my archives page at admin end the Template drop-down in Page Attribute box was missing. Strange. I searched over the issue and found some good resources explaining ‘how and why’ of the problem and some remedies as well to bring the Template Drop down(box??) back. Here are two of them:
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/no-templates-in-edit-page-template-is-missing
http://www.maverickwebcreations.com/2008/11/04/fix-the-wordpress-missing-page-template-bug.html
I tried some remedies for myself but nothing came out as good as i required. I searched for “Template” terms in CSS files (they said this could cause issue), switched between themes(as per suggestion), cursed my new theme(#$^%:(*&%#@!) and so and so… And then i went to sleep tired of it. zzzzzzzzz… zzzzzzz…
In the morning after checking my emails, and after writing last post, i decided to resolve the issue or even to change the template if it wouldn’t work. After trying some fixes again, (as a good move) i decided to compare archives.php template of new theme to archives.php template of old theme and hello, there is no archives.php template file in new theme! (i need to learn wordpress, of course!)
Well, well. I got it now. So this is how it works. If you do not have any additional template file (in addition to default template) it would not show the Template drop-down box under Page Attribute section. I copied my old archives.php file into new theme folder and finally i am a happy man now.
Thanks for reading.
Go to Appearance -> Themes
and Activate the theme from Default Theme.
Now you will be able to see.
That is how i fix this problem.
@Abid – But what happens if you activate a new theme and it still occurs? You cannot always stick to the Default Theme.