All the website templates in our themes are defined using the default Liferay locale. Thus
<root available-locales="en_US" default-locale="en_US">
in all the files under /WEB-INF/classes/resources-importer/journal
This will prevent the site template from being imported when deploying the theme if your Liferay locale is different than the default one (en_US). There are some Liferay issues regarding this problem:
Even if some see it as a feature (http://issues.liferay.com/browse/LPS-31740) and not a bug :-)
- The first workaround would be to replace all occurrences of en_US with your Liferay local or at least one of the defined values of the property “locales” in portal-ext.properties.
- The second one is revert your portal to en_US temporarily and the templates will get imported correctly.
(Many Thanks to Atanas and Jeremy for their help)