Tag Archives: Sitemap

An XSLT stylesheet does not have an XML mimetype

9 Mar

WordPress logo in blueI have recently been brushing up on my WordPress knowledge for a blog I have created for a client. While working on the blog I noticed that the error below displayed when trying to view a dynamically generated sitemap (/sitemap.xml) in my Firefox browser:

Error loading stylesheet: An XSLT stylesheet does not have an XML mimetype:

http://DOMAIN_NAME.com/wp-content/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/sitemap.xsl

The sitemap was created by the superb Google XML Sitemaps plugin for WordPress and after a quick bit of research on Google I came across this article at tutsarena.

It is important to mention that the error only occurs in the Firefox browser and not Internet Explorer (for a change). The error is not WordPress – specific but was actually related to the Apache server the client’s website was hosted on.

To fix the error add the following line of code to the bottom of your .htacces file (found in the root of your site):

AddType text/xsl xsl

This adds the MIME type for XSL, which was missing from the list of MIME types on the client’s server.

If you are still having problems try adding the below line of code as well as the above code into the .htacces file:

AddType application/xml xml

This should sort everything out nicely.

This is a quick fix for anyone who has seen the following error appear when trying to edit a WordPress theme through the admin section:

The Requested Theme Does Not Exist

I remember seeing this and immediately fearing the worst (that I had broken my WordPress blog somehow) but I had a think of what I had been changing on the site before I got this error (the CSS file) and after a quick look on Google I found this article.

The article mentions that the commented-out information at the top of the CSS file (containing the theme details) is used by WordPress to pull out the theme name:

/*
Theme Name: WordPress Default
Theme URI: http://wordpress.org/
Description: The default WordPress theme based on the famous <a href="http://binarybonsai.com/kubrick/">Kubrick</a>.
Version: 1.6
Author: Michael Heilemann
Author URI: http://binarybonsai.com/
Tags: blue, custom header, fixed width, two columns, widgets

 Kubrick v1.5

http://binarybonsai.com/kubrick/

 This theme was designed and built by Michael Heilemann,
 whose blog you will find at http://binarybonsai.com/

 The CSS, XHTML and design is released under GPL:

http://www.opensource.org/licenses/gpl-license.php

*/

At the time I wasn’t too familiar with WordPress and had just deleted the code to save about 15 lines in my CSS file. If you delete the code or use certain special characters in the theme name (such as an ampersand – &) WordPress cannot find the theme and display the templates or CSS in the admin section for you.

To fix this quite simply check the commented code at the top of the theme’s CSS for any characters which may be causing the error. Or if you did what I had done and delete the commented code completely, put it back in via ftp and WordPress will load up the editor section straight away.