Forum Discussion
New "Site Pages" feature in O365 Team Sites conflicting with Publishing feature
Hi guys,
I don't know if this is the appropriate channel to post something like this. If not, please redirect me to the right one.
Between yesterday and today we've noticed a new behavior in most of the O365 tenants. The new SharePoint feature “Site Pages”, which did not exist before, has started to be activated in all newly created Team Sites.
When this feature is activated, you cannot activate the feature “SharePoint Server Publishing” in the Team Site.
As this is something affecting critically all our cloud customer base and their productive environments, is there any way we can detailed info about why this behavior is applying now, if there is any way to prevent it and what are the implications of disabling the "Site Pages" feature?
We're aware that SPFx is rolling out and this feature might be part of the infrastructure supporting it, but we'd like to understand what are the real implications for O365 productive systems. This behavior started happening regardless of whether the environment has "Enable" or "Disable preview features".
Thanks in advance,
Enric
PS: Posted also in the Office 365 Development space.
cc Chris McNulty Mark-Kashman danholme LincolnDeMaris
Matt MootyMicrosoft
Hi Enric,
We have reverted the code which causes the two features to fail activation if the other is already active. You should now be able to activate the SharePoint Server Publishing feature when the Site Pages feature is already active and vice versa. Please let us know if it does not work.
Also, just to clear a couple things up: this Site Pages feature has been active on most Team sites and all new Team sites for months now, but it has not been visible. We made it visible and added the feature non-coexistence check recently, but it is unrelated to the SPFx rollout.
My apologies for any frustration this caused, and thank you for using SharePoint.
--Matt Mooty
Hi Matt, many thanks for your reply. We will try in our tenants.
Hi Matt,
I've tested this and it seems to be fixed.
I do have some mixed feelings about this. Your response time is great, apperantly fixing it in a couple fo days. But why is adding such a non-coexistence check not communicated, tested properly and rolled out gradually to first release tenants first? This seems to be a big breaking change that hurts a lot of people and causes serious issues. And especially when we're using a Microsoft recommended approach using remote provisioning.
Same problem here, every automated provision following MS best practices is failling.
"Enabling" Publishing feature in a Team Site created through CSOM doesn't fails, but don't enable all artifacts related to the feature.It'b great to announce these kind of things before the Go Live or enable a setting to give the chance to have it enabled by default or not, now... critical fixes everywhere now.
To make it even worse. When you provision the site, both the new site page feature and the publishing feature is activated. However, e.g. the pages library is not created even though the feature is active.
Trying to fix this manually, I disable both features and tried to enable the publishing feature. That gives an error. Clicking again on the features page, the feature is disabled. Enabling the feature doesn't create the pages library.
So now my code is not only broken, I'm also unable to fix existing sites that have been rolled out with both features enabled.
I am now seeing the error using ShareGate to copy a subsite from on-prem to SPO.
- Mark-KashmanHi Enric,
You got the right channel; a perfect use of the MS Tech Community - SharePoint. :-)
The new, modern publishing pages don't use the classic publishing infrastructure, and the team is aware of the conflict and is working on a plan to mitigate how modern & classic interact when used in the same site. I'll loop back with the team that was working on this fix, but for the mean time, if a site has the publishing infra turned on already, then you would not see modern pages yet; and if you have modern team site, you cannot activate the publishing infra (as you experienced).
A current method you could employ is to create a site collection from within the SPO admin center. This will create a classic site, of which you then should be able to activate the classic publishing feature. And for sites that do not require classic publishing, you can continue to use "Create site' from SharePoint home, Outlook, Planner - wherever you can create an Office 365 Group, that group gets a modern team site.
Hope that helps, and know the team is working on a way to resolve the classic and modern publishing side by side.
Thanks,
MarkI want to use audience targeting of Quick Links menu item on a Modern Team Site. Audience targeting is dependant on the Publishing feature.
I can activate the Publishing feature on Modern Team Sites, but this article says it's "not supported" ...
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/pnp_articles/modern-experience-customizations-customize-sites
So where are we up to with this, please?
Can we activate the Publishing feature in Modern Team Sites but it's not supported? Or is it supported now and the article is out of date?
- Matt Mooty
Hey Lawrence,
That article is still up to date. Unfortunately, activating Publishing is all-or-nothing, and while it gives you audience targeting it also creates some undesirable behaviors in other parts of the site, so we are not supporting customers getting into this state. We haven't made a hard block in code, largely due to feedback in this thread, and we are still considering options to better communicate our support while avoiding any customer pain.
I would suggest requesting an Audience Targeting feature for Quick Links in UserVoice, where we can evaluate adding such a feature to the modern sites in a way that doesn't drag along all of the Publishing feature.
I hope this helps!
--Matt
Thank you for the detailed explanation, Mark.
However, we are experiencing incompatibility in site collections already created with the SPO admin center.
When we create new subsites in these site collections, the feature "Site Pages" is activated by default, which prevents enabling the Publishing one. Our application automates the process of subsite creation + Publishing activation, and this process is now failing because before activating Publishing, first we need to deactivate the "Site Pages" feature.
How could we avoid generating a critical patch for all the environments? Do you know any other workaround?
- Mark-Kashman
Let me pull in Tejas Mehta who can dig a little more into it... Tejas?
