Hugo not responding to section templates or layout in front matter

I’m trying to use a section template in my theme and also the layout variable in my pages’ front matter. I’ve done it before and it had worked as well, but now any change I do does not change anything anymore.

I have a folder content/meetings/protocols on my website. There, I want the protocols to be paginated. I got the pagination to work but so far only on the default template. When trying to change anything in the section template, my changes are ignored. The template is located in layouts/meetings/protocols/list.html. I have also tried having it in themes/mytheme/layouts/meetings/protocols/list.html. However, the website still prioritizes the _default/list.html template in my theme folder.

I’ve also tried adding the layout variable in my page’s front matter, resulting in this:

---
 title: "Protocols"
 layout: list
 aliases:
   - /protocols
---

When I do that, it still doesn’t use the correct template. I’ve also added a layout: index to my other index pages and tried modifying the default/list.html, but then it also affects my other index pages in all sections.

I’ve tried restarting the server multiple times and reloading the page completely (Ctrl + F5) but none of it works. Am I missing something here?

The layout front matter param is expecting the layout section name. I’m not able to test this at the moment, but try one of these variants: See below replies

layout: meetings
layout: protocols
layout: meetings/protocols

Ah, that’s good to know.
However, your tip didn’t work.
Is what I was referring to the type variable then? Because I thought that that was the one defining the sections.

I found a solution!
I used the following:
type: meetings/protocols
Thank you for the tip!

Good deal. Yeah my memory is fuzzy in this area of Hugo so good to know that it was type not layout that did the trick.