Post Preview failing, Rendering process failed File post-alternative.hbs does not exist. for Mercury Theme [Bug report]

[naivchan]

Operating system

Windows 11

Publii version

0.47.0 (build 17290)

Issue type

Application

Bug description

Every time I try to generate a preview of a post on the Mercury theme, I keep getting this error message: "Rendering process failed File post-alternative.hbs does not exist. "

I even copied the post.hbs and retitled it post-alternative.hbs in the theme folder, but that didn't seem to fix the problem. I was on 0.46 when the problem first occurred, and I tried updating Publii to see if that would fix the problem. It didn't 😢

I run into this problem with existing post previews as well, so I don't know what's causing this issue.

I can still generate a preview of the entire site, which seems to render everything correctly.

Steps to reproduce

No response

Relevant log output

No response

[candidexmedia]

Which version of Mercury are you using? Have you made any changes or edits to your theme files since the last time your site preview worked?

I even copied the post.hbs and retitled it post-alternative.hbs in the theme folder, but that didn't seem to fix the problem.

Caution: the post.hbs file is required, so don't delete or rename it.

[naivchan]

I'm using Mercury version 3.1.1.0. I haven't made any changes to the theme code other that the customization choices inside the Publii settings.

[candidexmedia]

Were you playing around with a previous theme that had a post/page template called "alternative"? Is it possible that one of your posts/pages has that template assigned to it?

[naivchan]

I used to use the Mono theme, but I switched to Mercury quite a while ago. This is a problem that has occurred recently, within the past week or two.

Currently, all the post template dropdowns for all my posts are greyed out and say "Not available in your theme".

[naivchan]

I'm not sure why this is occurring, but I found a workaround.

I navigated to Publii\sites[yoursitename]\input\themes\mercury, and then duplicated post.hbs. I renamed the duplicated post.hbs to post-alternative.hbs.

This seems to fix the issue, but I don't know why Publii is looking for a post-alternative.hbs for the Mercury theme since it doesn't have one.

[candidexmedia]

Very odd! Glad you found a solution!

[bobmitro]

It’s a bug. At first, I thought it was just some kind of glitch on your side because the preview was working fine for me. And indeed, the full page preview works correctly, but the post preview in the post editor does not.
I can’t promise, but likely to be resolved in an upcoming bugfix release.

[dziudek]

@naivchan the issue is quite complicated to resolve and also will probably affect other template types so we will fix it in v.0.47.2/v.0.48 as it need deeper changes in the renderer

[naivchan]

Okay, glad it's not just me.

[michaelfluegge]

Not sure whether this helps, but the Mono theme has a post-alternative.hbs but the Mercury theme has not. So I could imagine that if one chooses the alternative file for the posts and then switches from Mono to Mercury this might lead to this error message.

[bobmitro]

The new Publii v.0.47.2 has been released (changelog).