Forum Discussion
Modern sites - news webpart limitations
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.
Hi Ian
Just to be clear, both our team and communication sites have the same URL for the news items, both under sitepages. Both include the name of the news page (below as 'newsitem.aspx'):
Communication Sites:
https://(name).sharepoint.com/sites/(sitename)/SitePages/newsitem.aspx
Team Sites:
https://(name).sharepoint.com/teams/(sitename)/SitePages/newsitem.aspx
Are you saying that this link on your site doesn't include the news page name, just a link to the general 'sitepages' library?
Hi Andrew - See the attached diagram for a clearer explanation. Things are fine if people click on the news headline
The problem is that when people hover over the site (above the headline) it changes colour - if they click on it they then just get the directory of site pages organised by author leading to end user confusion... I would never want them to see this page.
Thanks Ian, it was helpful to see the screenshot.
In our environment we have a mixture of team and communication sites, as well as O365 Group-based team sites. On the main SharePoint landing page, users can see news from the sites they follow. https://(org).sharepoint.com/_layouts/15/sharepoint.aspx
Those news items have three URL links:
- The news photo and the (identical link) news item title: https://(org).sharepoint.com/sites/(sitename)/SitePages/(page title).aspx
- The site name between the photograph and the news item title: https://(org).sharepoint.com/sites/(sitename)
Note that the title of the news page (e.g., 'news from today') may be different from the name ('news-from-today').
- News items on the front page of team sites point to the /sitepages/ URL: https://(org).sharepoint.com/teams/(sitename)/SitePages/(newspagename).aspx.
- News items on the front page of communication sites also point to the /sitepages/ URL:
https://(org).sharepoint.com/sites/(sitename)/SitePages/(newspagename).aspx - News items on the front page of O365 Group-based sites do the same:
https://(org).sharepoint.com/teams/(sitename)/SitePages/(newspagename).aspx
The problem seems to be that your 'Intranet Home' link, which should be a link to the site URL but points to '/Home/SitePages/Forms/name.aspx' (the site pages library) and not the actual site name. In the page source I can see that library name but our news items are correctly showing the site URL.
I'm sorry I don't know how this might be fixed.
interesting discussion.
here is the ignite 'making a news site' demo that may have some useful snippets about how they see this working https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Ignite/Microsoft-Ignite-Orlando-2017/THR2036
also the overview of HUBS is very relevant to news as that will be where that extra link comes into play eventually. see here , second half of video https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Ignite/Microsoft-Ignite-Orlando-2017/BRK2393
