Creating a Publishing site collection in SharePoint 2013 Preview using the Central Administration UI, results in a nice shiny publishing site, as you’d expect;

Creating the same site using Powershell, at least for me, resulted in something not quite the same.

The powershell I used was this, simple stuff;

## =====================================================================
## Title       : Add-SPSite
## Description : Adds a New SharePoint Site.
## Input       : Add-SPSite [[-url] <String>] [[-Title] <String>] [[-Description] <String>] [[-Template] <String>] [[-OwnerAlias] <String>]
## Output      : 
## Usage       : Add-SPSite -url http://sp/sites/mysite -Title "My New Site" -Description "Description of New Site" -Template "STS#0" -OwnerAlias "PDOGS\Administrator" or "i:0#.w|pdogs\administrator" 
## Change log  :
## =====================================================================

param (

   [string]$url = "$(Read-Host 'url [e.g. http://sp/sites/mysite]')", 
   [string]$Title = "$(Read-Host 'Title of New Site Collection [e.g. My New Site]')",
   [string]$Description = "$(Read-Host 'New Site Collection Description [e.g. Description of My New Site]')",
   [string]$Template = "$(Read-Host 'Template to use [e.g. STS#0]')",
   [string]$OwnerAlias = "$(Read-Host 'Owner [e.g. PDOGS\Administrator or i:0#.w|pdogs\administrator]')"
)

function main() {

    Write-Host
    $site = Get-SPSite -Identity $url -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
    if ($site -ne $null) {
        Write-Host "A site at ""$url"" already exists!" -ForegroundColor Red
        return
    }
    New-SPSite -url $url -OwnerAlias $OwnerAlias -Description $Description -Language 1033 -Name $Title -Template $Template
    Write-Host "Created new site at ""$url"" " -ForegroundColor White
}

Write-Host
$snapin = Get-PSSnapin | Where-Object {$_.Name -eq 'Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell'}
if ($snapin -eq $null) {
	Write-Host "    ..  Loading SharePoint PowerShell Snapin" -ForegroundColor Gray
    Add-PSSnapin -Name "Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell"
}
Write-Host "    Microsoft SharePoint PowerShell snapin loaded" -ForegroundColor Gray 

main

Checking the SPWeb properties of the root web didn’t yield much until I noticed that the MasterUrl and CustomMasterUrl properties were set to use the v4.master masterpage;

The fix was therefore easy, setting the MasterUrl and CustomMasterUrl properties using powershell to the new 2013 v15.master.

Clear-Host
$w = Get-SPWeb "http://sp/sites/ctype"
$w.MasterUrl = "/sites/ctype/_catalogs/masterpage/v15.master"
$w.CustomMasterUrl = "/sites/ctype/_catalogs/masterpage/v15.master"
$w.Update()
$w | select Url,ClientTag,MasterUrl,CustomMasterUrl,UseV15Rendering

Once done, the publishing site rendered using the correct masterpage.