SharePoint 2010 New Enterprise Search Center Site – Unexpected Error Has Occurred

 

I was recently trying to provision a sub site in SharePoint 2010 Server Enterprise edition using the Enterprise Search Center site template,  until I ran into the famous error – An unexpected error has occurred.

To recap how I got to this point I performed the following steps.

1. Using the Silverlight site template picker I chose the template and entered in the site’s title and url.

2. Then I immediately witnessed this error:

3.  To the Cloud… 

In my research of this scenario I came across Paul Grimley’s post on this issue.

He states that to get around this issue, the SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure features must be activated at the site collection.

4.  Lets test…  SUCCESS!  I activated the publishing infrastructure feature and I was then able to create an Enterprise Search Center site.

Corey Roth states that the above error may actually be presented in one of  two flavors of this error.   The first which I explained here, and another which is much more helpful – “The SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure must be activated at the site collection level before the Publishing feature can be activated.”  I’m not sure what dependency this site template has on the publishing feature, but I hope this will help someone else get past this issue.