The xmlfeed.tmpl file didn't use the naming convention specific of the XMLFeedSpider. Namely, it used parse_item (which has been deprecated) instead of parse_node and it didn't show the iterator and itertag attributes.

scrapy/templates/spiders/xmlfeed.tmpl

@@ -5,8 +5,10 @@ class $classname(XMLFeedSpider):
     name = '$name'
     allowed_domains = ['$domain']
     start_urls = ['http://www.$domain/feed.xml']
+    iterator = 'iternodes' # you can change this; see the docs
+    itertag = 'item' # change it accordingly
 
-    def parse_item(self, response, selector):
+    def parse_node(self, response, selector):
         i = ${ProjectName}Item()
         #i['url'] = selector.select('url').extract()
         #i['name'] = selector.select('name').extract()