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Remove items from News on SharePoint Communication Site
We have a requirement to expire news posts, but we would like keep them for later as archives.
Removing a post actually removes the page in Pages library:
Is there a way to un-promote a Page from the News 'feed', without deleting?
You can change the promoted state to 0, which makes the site a "regular" site page, not a News page. To do that you first have to expose Promoted State in a view (choose a flat view to make it easier to edit). (Use the + in the library view and then select Promoted State and be sure to press Apply.) Once you ahve exposed the column, you can change the order by editing the view.
Then, in quick edit, change promoted state from 2 (news) to 0 (site page). I think the challenge with this approach is that the page still exists and it can still be found in search and you now have it mixed in with "regular" site pages. You could also add a column to Site Pages and "tag" the page as Archive or something like that - but unless you un-publish, it will still be visible in search.
Demoting Sharepoint News without having to delete the page:
- On the Sharepoint site click on "Site Content".
- Click on "Site Pages".
- Select the "All Pages" View.
- Click on Add Column and then on the show/hide columns option a call out menu of all the available columns will appear on the right of the page.
- Tick the "Promoted state" Colum and then tick the apply option.
- Click on the "Quick Edit" option and see if you can edit the value in the "Promoted State" Column the chances are that it will be greyed out in which case you need to follow the further steps.
- Exit Quick Edit, Click the drop down arrow on the promoted state column and go to column settings and edit. A call out menu will appear on the right hand side, don't change it just click save this will enable the option to edit the promoted state value as noted below.
- Select the page that you want to change the promoted state of, click on the circled i to bring up the information options and then select "Edit All"
- The value under promoted state should be editable now and 0 equals not promoted and 2 equals promoted.
I would add a couple of caveats to this advice. Use the promote or create news page to promote pages in the first place don't change the value above to 2 as a way of promoting a page. This could be open to human error and you might end up promoting the wrong page. Secondly it might make sense to use the permissions level to change who can and cannot change the promoted state as you don't want everybody to be able to do this. I am unsure exactly how to do this.
This does not cover the option to set a timescale on a news item which is shown above.
Hope this helps.
Hydeparkandy The number of responses here about a basic and obvious requirement - the ability to truly unpublish news posts - indicates just how poorly designed and confused the modern/classic hybrid state of SP is.
The "unpublish" option just unpublishes the latest version and reverts to the previous one - so doesn't do what it implies.
Changing a post's promoted state field to 0 to make it a regular site page doesn't remove it from the news feed so also apparently doesn't do what it implies. My guess is there's a bug here or a coding error that causes this.
Note also the strange logic behind the promoted state field. A value of "2" technically means a published news post. But if you manually change that property to published (2), you're editing the page so need to republish it. Makes no sense.
The only real option is to train people to not publish until they are sure they want their content to be seen. (Good luck with that!) If they do by mistake, they'll have to delete the post and start over. Or manually reposition the offending post so it drops off the news web part view.
Jeeeez!
We can now demote news or unpromote it using the following application customizer
M365061290 Anyone know why when we "Unpublish" a news article, nothing happens? The article is still posted on the front page and visible to all, and "Publish" option is then available for that page because its been unpublished. If its still visible whether its published or unpublished, what does publishing actually mean?
Thanks
Deleted Give the search indexer time to run and make sure you are checking with an account that is not an editor of the site. When I unpublish, it takes a few minutes for the article to be removed. To make it easier to tell which pages are unpublished, make sure that you have Version showing up in the Pages view. Pages where the version is not .0 are either unpublished or the latest version has not been published.
@Jonathan Herschel I know I'm late to the party with this suggestion, and you've probably moved on from that immediate client need. But here's an alternative approach that may help folks with this same issue.
There are certain News articles that are important and need more visibility than a normal article. Maybe they're reminders for an important company event or deadline, and you want them front & center up to a certain date--but after the date passes, you no longer want to promote them. They're regular news articles in every way, except they need to be highlighted for a while.
By changing their Promote state, they will no longer appear in the consolidated news archive which is a valuable historical reference of all news. I would like to retain all news there, unfortunately changing the promote property will remove them from this feature of the SharePoint home page.
This alternative approach is to add 2 Metadata fields for the Contributor to use only on items they wish to Highlight. One field flags if they wish to highlight, the second is a date field for them to define the expiration date for the highlight. Then use the Highlighted Content web part to filter these items and reveal them with either the "Cards" view or the "Carousel" view. I've titled the web part "Don't Miss News"
HERE'S THE STEPS:
- Create a Multiple Choice column in the Site Pages library that has "Highlight" and "Don't Highlight" as the 2 choices. Title this column "Highlight"
- Create a Date Column in the Site Pages library. Title this column "Highlight Expires"
- Enter some test data in these new fields
- At a minimum create 3 items that are flagged "Highlight" and give one each the expiration dates of Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow.
- Go to the page you want to reveal these items on, and add a Highlighted Content web part to the page.
- Configure it as I have in the screen capture.
EXTRA TIPS:
Once you experience this highlight technique, you'll likely find lots of ways to use it, I know I have. So here's a couple extra tips so you can get more distance from it.
You can do this with 1-off columns, but I like to use this "Highlight" technique for lots of things throughout my SharePoint ecosystem, so I have created the columns as Site Columns on all my sites. Additionally, for the Yes/No Highlight field, I prefer to use a Managed Metadata field with a simple term set of "Highlight" and "Don't Highlight" as the options. This gives me more options when using the new Metadata Properties features, which don't work with the Boolean Yes/No field today. I just find I get more "bang for the buck" as the descriptions are more clear to contributors, and I can use it for additional functionality.
- Show the "Highlight" status on the page, using the Page Properties Web Part.
- Create a "Featured Content" Term Set that contains "Highlight" and "Don't Highlight" Terms
- This is required because the Metadata functionality recently introduced:
- Only works with Managed Metadata
- Doesn't work with the Boolean yes/no field, but does work with choice fields
- I prefer to set this up as a tenant-wide term store, rather than on an individual site, because once you use it, you'll find all sorts of other things you want to use it for.
- Create the columns as Site Columns, so they can be easily reused without having to configure each time.
Cheers!
- What a great solution! Thank you! I have wanted multiple news feeds to post on different places in the site-- and this is the perfect answer.
- Wow, that was easy.
I was looking for something like [Remove from News] or [Unpromote], but Unpublish works.
Only downfall, is when I go to Publish again (we have minor / major versions turned on) to make it view-able by all readers, it adds it back to the News...- Yeah your right, wasn't thinking it through as far as history. The only way is to change promoted State to 0 from 2. I saw Laura do it in one of her video's in the past by adding that column to the view but doesn't seem to work anymore. I'll play around and see if i can figure it out, but if you can figure out how to change that value that will remove from news. I know you can do it via Flow, so you could always create a flow button to change that if you can't find another way.
