SOLVED

Remove items from News on SharePoint Communication Site

Iron Contributor

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?

56 Replies

That worked perfectly thank you! I wanted to post something in the News Feed for a while-- but later take it out of there. I also needed to NOT have it in news while people were reviewing the content before I posted it. Perfect solution and now I can move things back and forth easily. 

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.

I've just followed this through to creating a new view with the Promoted State column.

Now, when I go in Quick Edit mode, the Promoted State column appears in a lighter shade than other columns, and it won't let me key in, or Flash Edit to change the 2 into a 0.

Make sure you are not using. Group By view. Quick Edit can only be used in a “flat” view. 

@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posted on the front page and visible to all, and "Publish" option is then available for that page because its been unpublished. If its still visible whether its published or unpublished, what does publishing actually mean?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

Did you give it time for the search indexer to remove it? It takes up to 15 minutes sometimes to remove it since those news web parts are based on search index.

@Chris Webb Yeah its been over an hour and I've tried this before with no luck. I've just directed them to delete the pages going forward, "publish" and "unpublish" has no effect on our pages. Modern communication site.

@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 To make it easier to tell which pages are unpublished, make sure that you have Version showing up in the Pages view. Pages where the version is not .0 are either unpublished or the latest version has not been published.

@Susan Hanley Yeah I was thinking if unpublished means it unpublished the last published version. If that's the case it will roll back to an old article you would think. Then might have to resort to changing the page's "Promoted State" to 0 via Quick Edit hack. 

@Turismon null I'm just surprised there is no functionality built in to manage news posts? All news will eventually need to be removed, and there solution is just to delete pages. However some obviously would like to retain pages history for relevant posts in the future, but we need to rely on a third party promote 'hack' to manage this. Strangest cms I've ever used.

3rd party? You just go add a column to the existing default view, and change the flag from 2 to 0. It's pretty easy, but I agree, we should have a button for it. You can make a flow that does it as well pretty easily.

@Deleted Page scheduling is coming. It was announced at SPC19. I know they talked about scheduling a page to post at a specific date and I'm hoping that there will also be a way to "un-pupblish" on a specific date as well, like there was in earlier versions of SharePoint on prem - but I'm not sure. If there is a feature you really want that isn't there, you should add it to user voice. Microsoft really pays attention to what people want - but not everything makes it to the roadmap at the same time! 

@Susan Hanley That is good news, yeah I try to leave feedback from time to time and understand things are in flux with sharepoint. The publishing thing had me confused though. I will try editing promote flags to make this work. Thanks.

Yeah it's finicky. Just edit the default view (assuming quick edit shows), add/show columns. Add promoted state in. Save the view with same name so it saves over it. Refresh the page, if quick edit shows, click and then you should be able to easily change 2's to 0 to unpublished. I want to say you also have to edit the article after that to get it to "Reindex". Dunno if they have fixed that or not. But you just go to page after changing to 0, click edit, then publish again and it'll get removed.
ops, just realized I was replying on my wrong account lol.... Doh.

@Turismon null Thanks for the info. I have already added to promoted state column and see that, but I'm a bit stuck on how to change it? I have tried viewing the all the options available for that page in properties etc but don't see anywhere I can change that 2 to a 0. In searches I've found a github extensions that supposedly allows this, but seems I can do this without it? Just not sure how.

This is where you use Quick Edit. Once it's in the view and saved, and showing as a column, you change it inside the quick edit view, then click done.

@Chris Webb ok yes I saw you refer to 'quick edit' but that must not be enabled. I don;t see a quick edit option available anywhere.

Create a new view or go to another documents library and see if it shows. Are you using chrome or IE? It probably requires one of those. But sometimes it doesn't show, if you can see it other places, then create a new default view on the site pages library, and it should show quick edit. Then add the column, save over it, and refresh, it should then appear to be used.