Well, I've had 9.01 DNN/Evoq trial for a couple of days and I already broke it (this is why we can't have nice things). My hope is that someone has seen this and knows how to fix it!

The symptom is that my site settings -> default pages admin screen is busted. The other admin areas seem ok, but the default pages tab is blank with the red error message of "There was an error retrieving your content. Please check your internet connection." The inspector shows that the request actually returned with a 500 error and a generic "an error occurred" message.

This is how it seems to have happened:

I started with the blank site template. I have a single site set up, which is Portal 0.

I had set the default page for the site set to a home page, which was not visible in the site's menu. 

I enabled Structured Content and set up a content type and a visualizer.

I edited the home page, clearing out the plain text and aiming to put in the visualizer. However, I had trouble with the content item entry, had no content item, ran out of time and ultimately had to leave it. I didn't close the page, just left it in the editor. When I finally came back, I clicked on the "discard" button thinking that it would discard my changes and leave the page as it had been.

Nope.

Instead, the page vaporized and I ended up with an error instead of a home page. I can get into the site still by the other page URLs that I had set up, and thus access the admin area that way. However, my default page assignment area won't show up anymore.

I checked the database and found that there was no such page as my home page anymore, but the default home page for the site was still set to the id of the old, otherwise non-existent page. I tried setting that field in the portal localization table to the tab id of a new page, but it was still busted; finally I set it to NULL, but still no luck. I can't see the default page admin tab and I don't have a working home page.

Has anyone seen this issue before, or know how I might recover my default pages admin screen and/or home page?

Thanks!

 

Thank you, Sebastian, but that only solves the issue for right now. If we don't know what causes that behavior and we don't know how to fix it, I'm not sure that I'm comfortable with setting up a production version of the site. Once the new site is fully built and live, I won't have the luxury of starting over.

Any other ideas?

Thanks!