WordPress Broken Theme : Template is missing

I came across an interesting bug on a Wordpress development project I was working on this week. The issue was that the Wordpress Theme was reported as a Broken Theme because the "Template is missing" on the Appearances->Themes admin page.



In most cases the site was performing as expected using the allegedly broken theme, however the custom template selection was no longer available on the Pages admin page. (This is where I first spotted there was a problem and then discovered the Appearances->Themes admin page.)

After poking about for a bit, I traced the problem to a rather innocuous looking line the designer had added to the theme's style.css file.

/* UNIQUE CATEGORY TEMPLATE: VIDEO*/

It's just the "TEMPLATE:" portion that caused the style.css parser to fail. This line works just fine:

/* UNIQUE CATEGORY TEMPLATE : VIDEO*/

I doubt this error comes up often, but it took a few minutes to track down the problem so I thought I'd post something here to hopefully save somebody time in the future.