This has been resolved.

I simply added an absolute path to my css file in the master layout and everything is back to normal, I had goofed a bit in the description of the problem, I was getting my layout stuff, however I was not getting my css styling.

Does anyone know of a helper function to link the stylesheet? (besides linking it with an absolute path) I found it odd that despite making the link relative to the document root the css file was not found.

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