On one of the sites I administer, we are using a premium theme that comes with custom page templates.

When setting up a new page on this site, I noticed the Page Template option was missing from the Edit Page page.

I knew older pages were using the same template, so I knew the file wasn’t missing. I checked anyway. Yep, it was there. Maybe there was something weird in the header that was keeping WordPress from registering it as a template.

I downloaded and opened the template file and this is what I found (I replaced the template name to protect the sloppy):

<?php /* Template Name: [redacted] */ ?>

I would not have thought the absence of newlines would have mattered, but I knew that was not like the example that WordPress gives here. So I added some newlines.

<?php 
/* 
Template Name: [redacted] 
*/ 
?>

(Make sure you replace [redacted] with your template name.)

Then I uploaded the change, refreshed my Edit Page and the template option was restored.

I’m off to fix the other pages.

Hopefully in the next update of this theme they fix the problem or I will need to update the page files again.