Umbraco Alternate Template Feature (bug)

Posted written by Paul Seal on October 03, 2015 Umbraco

There is an annoying feature in Umbraco which, when not wanted, seems like a bug.  If you want to view a page with a different template, you can enter the url/templateAliasName

Eg. http://www.exampleurl.com/contactTemplate

This will display the home page using the template with the alias of contactTemplate.  You can also do this by adding a query string to a page’s url

Eg. http://www.exampleurl.com/?altTemplate=contactTemplate

This does the same as the above

 

The problem lies when you have a template name which is the same as a page name.

If you want to turn off this functionality, you can remove this line from the file /config/404handlers.config

<notFoundassembly="umbraco"type="SearchForTemplate"/>

This leaves the query string functionality in place, but removes the first one which uses the path.

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