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.

If you would like to know more about Umbraco, why not use your 10 day free trial with pluralsight and go through the umbraco courses.

Paul Seal

Umbraco MVP and .NET Web Developer from Derby (UK) who specialises in building Content Management System (CMS) websites using MVC with Umbraco as a framework. Paul is passionate about web development and programming as a whole. Apart from when he's with his wife and son, if he's not writing code, he's thinking about it or listening to a podcast about it.

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