Forum Discussion
Modern sites - news webpart limitations
Hi - I'm about to launch a new intranet based on communication sites and finding lots of limitations with the news web part
1) The owner of my homepage would like to be able to identify news articles in the list of site pages. I've added the column promotedstate (using lookup from promoted state) to site pages to try and show where the value is 2 but can't get any values to display in that list view. Is there a better way?. It would be great if Microsoft would provide a way for pages to be changed to news articles.
2) Ideally we want to be able to rank news stories to control the order they appear. Is there any method to use a refineable field or managedproperty to do this?
3) The modern news web part doesn't have any controls to say whether to show news from just this site or the site collection. I'm therefore forced to use highlighted content for news which doesn't display news articles in the same way (you don't get the same first sentence of the article shown).
Is there any other way to refine what the news web part searches for? It seems to be the only modern web part with no controls when its one of the most important things on a homepage!
Thanks
Ian
For 1) Try using the + Show/Hide columns option in the All Pages view of Site Pages. You can only expose Promoted State from the "modern" experience. Once you have it showing, you can group by Promoted State (again, from the modern experience) and then use Save As to save the view. I usually save it to All Pages and then make that the default. That makes it easy to find News pages. I haven't found a way to do (2), but should be able to add a SortOrder column (it might have to be a site column) to the library and then map it to an available RefinableStringxx column and use Highlighted Content to create your own list of articles. For (3), I've been using Highlighted Content to organize news articles and filter them with naming conventions (e.g. People Spotlight) but if your site structure follows "the world is flat" model, it won't matter whether news is site or site collection - because you won't have sub-sites. Once Hub Sites are available (Q1 2018), you will be able to roll up news from a family of sites on to the Hub. And from SharePoint home, users see all the News from sites they follow and those suggested by the Graph. News experiences are evolving but with some planning, what we have today is a really great start.
Hello Deleted, I am also considering using the modern sites for our Intranet. Did you use the News part in 2 or 3 column layout? I am actually experimenting with the various alternatives as can be seen here: http://www.marcofriedmann.de/blog/index.php/2017/11/03/the-news-teaser-webpart-comparison-of-different-column-layouts/
For 1) Try using the + Show/Hide columns option in the All Pages view of Site Pages. You can only expose Promoted State from the "modern" experience. Once you have it showing, you can group by Promoted State (again, from the modern experience) and then use Save As to save the view. I usually save it to All Pages and then make that the default. That makes it easy to find News pages. I haven't found a way to do (2), but should be able to add a SortOrder column (it might have to be a site column) to the library and then map it to an available RefinableStringxx column and use Highlighted Content to create your own list of articles. For (3), I've been using Highlighted Content to organize news articles and filter them with naming conventions (e.g. People Spotlight) but if your site structure follows "the world is flat" model, it won't matter whether news is site or site collection - because you won't have sub-sites. Once Hub Sites are available (Q1 2018), you will be able to roll up news from a family of sites on to the Hub. And from SharePoint home, users see all the News from sites they follow and those suggested by the Graph. News experiences are evolving but with some planning, what we have today is a really great start.
Thanks so much for your help Susan. I had promoted state to be a lookup field (from promoted state) but when I changed that to be calculated as =promotedstate instead it solved the problem and I've now created a view grouped as you suggested which is exactly what our news editor needs.
I hadn't heard about Hub sites coming but will check them out too.
One last thing which is strange on (3) is that all our news stories in the highlighted content web part have in small text the site that they have come from (eg. Intranet Home) above the headline. This is a separate hyperlink that if clicked on just opens the site pages directory which obviously isn't a very good user experience and is confusing for users. Is this something that happens on your site? It never used to be there so I'm not sure what has caused this to suddenly appear.
I've attached a screenshot here if that didn't make sense.
Thanks again for your most helpful response!!Ian, that link under the graphic and above the headline on our news items all show the correct URL for the site:
https://(name).sharepoint.com/teams/(sitename)
The link to the news sites are all under the /SitePages/ link (and also embedded in the graphic):
https://(name).sharepoint.com/SitePages/(sitepage).aspx
