Victory!

I had a couple of issues to fix with the production site in order to get it to create a syntactically correct template. 

First off I simply had too many files, with a few thousand pictures in the Ventian SImple Gallery the export template would apparently timeout or just lose it's mind at some point. I never got an error message, but I did finally see one in the host logs. Opening the template in an XML lint showed it was missing completion tags. Removing most of the pictures and moving them elsewhere resolved that issue.

Next even though I had a syntactically valid template, and all the modules, skins, containers, and database would install and all the pages would be created the site wasn't usable. The site acted like there was no skin at all and looked rather bizarre like the old days when using the Lynx text only browser. Looking through the template I found references to a container that wasn't installed (and shouldn't have been).   Turns out that for a reason I can't explain a dozen of the modules installed had a hard-coded template. Why this wasn't causing some problems on the production site I have no idea. I removed references to the non-existent container and re-exported the template. Valla!

Lastly I found a permissions issue on one of the Ventian gallery albums. Again, why this was caused more serious issues on the live site I have no idea. The album we were putting the pictures in for misc pages wouldn't show in the image manager. If you manually used the path everything went fine, they just couldn't be inserted using the Image Manager because the entire folder wouldn't show up. Fixed the permissions on the production site, re-exported, re-implemented the site locally and all was well.

If I go through the trouble of writing this up it would be nice if it could end up in the Wiki so some other unsuspecting fool doesn't have to repeat my process.