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Structured Navigation (Publishing) not supported on "Modern" Sites/Pages/Lists/Libraries

Silver Contributor

Creating a dedicated post to track this.  Lots of discussion on this from Yammer, and havent really seen this anywhere here yet..

 

What is the status of new "Modern" capabilities to support structured navigation?

 

What structured navigation gives us today:

  • Dedicated navigation page
  • Menu items can be permissions limited by groups
  • Visual interface to easily move up / move down / create folders

 

For years we have had users leverage this navigation structure, because it was easier for them to "grasp" and the extra features that you dont get with just the regular navigation.

 

Right now, we have almost 500+ sites that leverage structured navigation.  We have also as an organization put real emphasis on the Top Global Navigation menu, and not as much on the Left Side Navigation menu (which "Modern" seems to really key off of).

 

This is one of the items keeping us from moving toward the modern UI, so we dont have to go redesign the navigation of every site just to fit into the new modern world.

 

If we have to bite the bullet and just touch every site to make it fit in modern, it would also be nice to know that.

111 Replies

Thanks for pointing out these issues, I'm working with a client that is getting ready to move from 2013 to SPO and we are trying to figure out how to reorganize sites and what to do about cross-site collection navigation. I'm really struggling with what to recommend, the rapidly changing functionality and lack of clarity from MS make it hard to design an IA and logical stucture that will meet future needs.

Ditto for me. We are also struggling to work with navigation alongside "modern" experience. Not only that, but we are also struggling to explain our users that the "Page not found" is NOT a menu item gone wrong by us, but a bug which is not yet solved by Microsoft. On a different note though, the "modern" experiences in lists and libraries come a jolt to the users. Somehow our users find the "classic" experience cleaner and neater as compared to the "modern" one. The "modern" experience looks and feels more vanilla and unpolished.

Same here,

We are also now focussing more on the top navigation.

 

Next to that for every major site collection and major themed/departemental sites wa have a home - landing - page containing "promoted links"-tiles. These tiles make it visually very easy to find your way around between major related sites and collections.

Would just be so much better if the tiles could be organized as a raster without any customization/script adding.

We turned off the new library experience until the navigation issues can be fixed, the majority of our sites are publishing sites and we cant have the navigation not working correctly.  I do like the look and feel of the new lists and libraries but will not roll it out to our users until navigation works like it should.

Thanks for posting this. We have turned off modern sites until the navigation is working more consistently.

 

I think the Modern UI should give more tools for building navigation (tiles, menus, other controls).

 

You can go to the URL for Top Menu and delete off the excess menu choices.

https://tentant_name.sharepoint.com/_layouts/15/topnav.aspx 

 

It's like the Top Menu has the Structured Navigation plus a bunch of random stuff. Even though you only see one level of navigation, the second level is in there too.

 

Be aware though, every time you edit the true Structured navigation, the "extra junk" links all get added back. Very frustrating.

 

A work in progress no doubt.

 

Will watch this thread for more news.

 

Rob.

...and /_layouts/15/quiklnch.aspx would be for the equivalent quick/left navigation section. In light of no information coming forward about when the navigation will be fixed in modern libraries, I'm going to have a look at cleaning these two areas up on one site and trying out the modern library experience with some users.

Thank you,+1 here! Currently the only issue completely stopping us from moving the majority of libraries to modern. Would be nice to see this in the pipeline. I guess there are some major updates coming to managing navigation. Can't see why it would take so long to address this otherwise. Would at least be nice to have a temporary support, until something else is in place, so that we can start getting users up to speed on the modern libraries.

 

On a side note: I measured that the TTFB for opening our libraries is up to 10-15 seconds(!), unlike the new ones which are max 1 second. Yet another reason to move over.

best response confirmed by VI_Migration (Silver Contributor)
Solution

@Brent Ellis (and others) - good news! We're finally pushing out a fix to support structured and managed navigation on modern pages/apps in classic sites.

 

With this update, if you have enabled publishing on a classic team site, your structured or managed navigation nodes will now render correctly in the modern pages (both global and current navigation), including any scoped or audience-targeted links. We haven’t pulled all the classic settings into the modern panels yet, so when you need to edit the navigation nodes the edit link will direct you back to the classic settings page (/areanavigationsettings.aspx).

 

We hope this unblocks folks who have been eager to move to the modern UX. Do try it out let us know if you have any questions. Thanks!

Still a few more roadblocks, but this helps remove one of the major ones!

 

achievementUnlocked.jpg

Thrilled to hear you are addressing this, thank you. A wish would be for MSFT to include updates like this one on the roadmap – making it a bit more detailed around the (post) rolllout of the modern experience. This would most likely reduce the confusion and number of posts here, all asking for the same thing.

Thats awesome, cant wait for it to rollout so we can start using the new lists and libraries once the navigation is working as it should.

Thank you!!

 

Is there something obvious we can see to know that our tenant has received this capablity?

 

Rob.

 

Hi @Sean Squires , i can't found anything on the fasttrack roadmap. When is this fix planned?

Oooh ooh, me want!   Looking forward to having this show up.  Any rough timeline?  Couple weeks?

Just noticed the update to the managed navigation, great news and definitely more user friendly already.

However it doesn't seem show sub-links at the moment, is this feature still to come? Thanks

We are having trouble with this. We have a modern Document library in a Sub-Site under a Site that uses the traditional UI. The modern is a test site.

We set the modern to be "Same as Parent" for Global, and Structural for Current navigation on the side. The document library is showing the Current navigation menus BOTH on the side and in place of the Global. Our true global is not shown at all.

I am not sure if we have the new code or not, not sure how to tell.

Rob.
That's what happens to us as well. I wrote a Powershell script that gets the root navigation, breaks the inheritance, and then updates the navigation in all sub-sites. Such a pain

Yes, I have only seen it working in one test susbite, while it doesn't seem to show in another. Not too sure why this might be, but glad to hear I am not the only one confused. Good to seeing things move forward though.

@Sean Squires any idea when this will hit all tenants? I'm having issues with Page not Found showing up in modern views even though it's tagged as hidden in the navigation.

1 best response

Accepted Solutions
best response confirmed by VI_Migration (Silver Contributor)
Solution

@Brent Ellis (and others) - good news! We're finally pushing out a fix to support structured and managed navigation on modern pages/apps in classic sites.

 

With this update, if you have enabled publishing on a classic team site, your structured or managed navigation nodes will now render correctly in the modern pages (both global and current navigation), including any scoped or audience-targeted links. We haven’t pulled all the classic settings into the modern panels yet, so when you need to edit the navigation nodes the edit link will direct you back to the classic settings page (/areanavigationsettings.aspx).

 

We hope this unblocks folks who have been eager to move to the modern UX. Do try it out let us know if you have any questions. Thanks!

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