Running SharePoint 2013 in 2010 mode and solution “CompatibilityLevel”
This post is a contribution from Vitaly Lyamin, an engineer with the SharePoint Developer Support team.
SharePoint 2013 allows users to run sites in SharePoint 2010 mode. In this scenario, the solution (WSP) deployment needs to be deployed with the “CompatibilityLevel” flag set to “All” or {14,15}.
When deploying the solution from the Central Administration UI, there’s no option to set the “CompatibilityLevel” flag and therefore the deployment job reverts to using the “SharePointProductVersion” attribute in the solution manifest. Since the “SharePointProductVersion” attribute can only be set to a single number, solution deployment from CA is limited to using that number for the “CompatibilityLevel” setting.
The suggested method for this type of deployment is to use PowerShell:
Install-SPSolution –Identity Solution.wsp –GACDeployment –CompatibilityLevel {14,15}
Resources:
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee617150.aspx
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff607534.aspx
HTH!