Inconvenient creating Publishing Pages in sites with Managed Navigation
Inconvenient SharePoint, Managed Navigation, Productivity, SharePoint 2013, Tools, Usability, WCM
Managed Navigation is one of the great new capabilities for building public-facing websites in SharePoint 2013. And while it offers great results, it’s challenging to work with from the end-user perspective.
Managed Navigation is the answer
Since the introduction of Web Content Management capabilities as a part of the SharePoint platform in 2007 many customers were asking for more flexibility in building URLs and decoupling site navigation hierarchy from the physical structure of the website. And although it was possible to a certain extent by building custom solutions, none of them were really integrated with SharePoint.
One of the new capabilities of SharePoint 2013 is Managed Navigation which allows you to define the navigation hierarchy of your website using a taxonomy. For every term you can define which physical page does it point to, what allows you to truly decouple the navigation from the physical structure of your website. This allows not only for more site management flexibility but also offers you the ability to optimize the website for the content authoring process that might be structured differently than what the visitors are seeing on the outside.
Structure without structure
When working with Managed Navigation there are basically two scenarios for where you store the physical content. One is using cross-site publishing and having your website connected to one or more Catalogs. In this scenario the content is stored in one or more Catalogs in other Site Collections and the terms from the Catalogs are pinned to the site’s navigation.
Another scenario is to create the Publishing Pages directly in the website and for every page define a Friendly URL (FURL), which will also automatically create a term in the Managed Navigation. In this scenario all pages, despite their hierarchy in the navigation, will be by default created in the Pages Library of the Root Web.
Inconvenient creating Publishing Pages in sites with Managed Navigation
When working with Catalogs, creating content is straight-forward: after all, simplifying the content creation process is one of the main goals of using Catalogs. When creating content in-site however, things get more challenging.
SharePoint 2013 offers you the two main ways to create new Publishing Pages: you can either use the New button from the Ribbon or the Add a page option from the Settings menu.
Although both options seem the same, they work differently when it comes to creating Publishing Pages with Managed Navigation. When creating a new Publishing Page using the New button from the Ribbon, no matter the current location in the navigation hierarchy, the page will be always created on the top level. Using the Add a page option however, the new page will be added to the navigation at the same level as the page that the user is currently on.
At this moment it is unclear whether this inconsistent behavior of both the New button and the Add a page option is by design or not, but it’s definitely something to take into account when working with Publishing Pages.
The interesting scenario however, that isn’t covered by either of the options, is when you want to create a subpage. Using the standard SharePoint 2013 functionality, in order to create a new page below the current page, you would first have to create a new page using the Add a page option, then you would have to navigate to Site Settings > Term store management and you would have to move the Term of the newly created page to its proper location. As you can see there is a better user experience to think of with regards to this scenario.
Easier creating Publishing Pages with Mavention New Publishing Page
Mavention New Publishing Page is a SharePoint 2013 solution that simplifies the process of creating Publishing Pages. Upon installation it replaces the standard New button from the Ribbon with a new one that allows you to choose whether you want to create a new page next to the current one (default) or below it (subpage).
Not only Mavention New Publishing Page simplifies the process of creating subpages by bringing it down to a single click, but it also makes it consistent across the different options available in the SharePoint 2013 user interface.
Summary
One of the new capabilities of SharePoint 2013 is Managed Navigation which allows site managers to decouple the navigation of a website from its physical structure. By default options for creating new Publishing Pages in the SharePoint 2013 user interface are inconsistent. Additionally creating new subpages requires manually manipulating the navigation terms. Mavention New Publishing Pages is a custom solution that simplifies the process of creating subpages and makes the options for creating Publishing Pages consistent.
Download: Mavention New Publishing Page (12KB, WSP)
February 25th, 2013 at 9:53 am
Hi,
Great post and highly relevant for a project that I'm currently working on.
I found the same "bug" (I see it as a bug) in that creating pages is only "valid" through Ribbon->New Page, and not from the links in the Pages library. In my case I want to be able to create pages from different page layouts, and the only way around this now is by first creating a page with the default layout (from Ribbon->New Page) and thereafter changing layout (if needed).
Can you solution be modified so that you can create a page with the correct page layout directly? (all on the same level)
February 25th, 2013 at 11:00 am
Since it's a whole different scenario I'd suggest to build a separate solution that would allow you to create a page using a specific layout, just to not break the default workflow and with that to not confuse users who are used to how things work out of the box.
February 25th, 2013 at 11:09 am
OK. In your solution – are the links shown under "New" customizable? (display text and to toogle on/off if subpage is visible)
February 25th, 2013 at 11:11 am
Not at this moment, no.
March 1st, 2013 at 4:46 pm
Hi Waldek,
I am having some similar issues. which i hope you could shed some light on with this. If i have a heirachy for e.g. HOME with a subsite of NEWS and i would like to create a load of news article underneath the NEWS site how would this work? I am not using a catalog and want to have created pages appear underneath the NEWS subsite. No matter which "new page" link i use from the two above it always appears on the root. Also when using content by search webpart. Also even if my page exists underneath "news/test.aspx" and the friendly url was "news/test" then i get a pagenotfound error page. This seems to be impossible to configure.
March 1st, 2013 at 4:48 pm
Managed Navigation doesn't play nicely with subwebs. I'm afraid that probably the only way for you to do it would be to navigate to the Pages Library in the News web and create the page there. Another challenge that you would have to deal with is the URL as you cannot have one and the same URL attached to a Navigation Term and a web.
March 1st, 2013 at 4:50 pm
One more thing. If i remove a term from the navigation for a news article page then it will no longer appear in results from a Content By Search webPart. if i "hide" in navigation then all ok. Any ideas?
March 1st, 2013 at 4:51 pm
Have you by any chance selected the checkbox to remove physical URLs from the search results (it's a property of every Publishing Page)?
March 2nd, 2013 at 8:22 am
Hi Chris, probably your NEWS site is inheriting its current navigation from HOME site. If you want pages to add as news/test1, news/test2… You need to configure a separate navigation termset for NEWS site's current navigation. This will directly add terms for newly created pages in current navigation termset and urls will relative to news/…
March 2nd, 2013 at 8:23 am
That should also resolve the problem with Content Search WP.
March 11th, 2013 at 4:53 am
Hi Waldek,
Thank you for your fantastic article about XSP, it's very well-written document on XSP.
I have a question about managed properties. I was wondering if you could spare some time and help me to solve my problem.
Due to changes in site columns and site structure, I had create my authoring site for couple of times and crawled the sites few times as well and as a consequence I had few irrelevant managed & crawled properties in the central administration. I tried to remove the extra managed properties and assuming that by reindexing my list, I would automatically get the right managed properties back, however, after running the crawler on my site I haven’t got the correct managed properties as I expected.
Is there any way that I can get the managed properties back?
Cheers,
Parham
March 11th, 2013 at 6:53 am
What do you mean exactly by 'getting them back'? SharePoint should create Managed Properties for Catalog columns (assuming they are Site Columns) automatically for you, but if it doesn't, there is nothing wrong with creating them yourself.
March 15th, 2013 at 3:28 pm
Hiren & Waldek..thank you very much for you help :) I really hope the taxonomy / sitename issue is a "bug" and not a "feature". Makes things slightly more illogical.
March 15th, 2013 at 3:29 pm
Another question that springs to mind (and i could not see one on your website Walkdek). What control should you use for a breadcrumb when using managed metadata navigation?
March 18th, 2013 at 7:58 am
Since it's just a navigation provider you could use the SiteMapPath control. See http://blog.mastykarz.nl/create-sharepoint-breadcrumbs-mavention-simple-sitemappath/ for more information.
May 7th, 2013 at 2:58 pm
Hi Waldek,
Great post as usual!
However, I can't make it work on a site collection with managed path (e.g. /sites/site1) although it's working fine on a root site collection. When creating a page under a managed path site, it always proposes the root site collection url. Any idea?
Thanks
-Franck
May 7th, 2013 at 4:10 pm
I haven't tested it in such scenario so it might be that there are some quirks to take into account. Is your site using Managed Navigation?
May 7th, 2013 at 4:49 pm
Yes it is.
May 10th, 2013 at 8:26 am
Hi Waldek,
A colleague of mine fixed the issue with site collections under a managed path (i.e. the new page's managed navigation always goes back to the root site collection).
The solution consists of prefixing the url with "_spPageContextInfo.webServerRelativeUrl" in the "createPublishingPage" function of the "Mavention.SharePoint.NewPublishingPage.PageComponent.js" file:
…
var dlgOptions = {
url: _spPageContextInfo.webServerRelativeUrl + '/_layouts/15/Mavention/CreatePublishingPageDialog.aspx?' + termInfo,
…
Cheers,
Franck
May 10th, 2013 at 5:10 pm
Great! Thank you for getting back with this fix.