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

Yup go to site pages, then more menu, and unpublish. This might be a newer SharePoint build, but that's where it is on my tenant. Capture.PNG

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.
best response confirmed by JHerschel (Iron Contributor)
Solution

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. 

Yeah that's what I was talking about, but anytime you add the Promoted State column now it removes quick edit option!
See if this works for you. Expose the Promoted State column and save the view. Then go in and open Edit current view. Save and close (you don't have to do anything). Then go back to the view. When I follow these steps, Quick Edit comes back. I completely forgot that this had happened to me the other day and I tried these steps to figure out what was going on and voila, quick edit came back! Let me know if this works for you too.

Yes, we want it in search, we want users to be able to look back at the past news, or at least that is how it works now in our current instance.

 

We also keep everything and might need to think about letting old news 'go away'...

 

I will look into FLOW to unpublish by changing that column from 2 to 0.

 

thanks

If that's the case, would it be OK to just let the News "roll off" the home page of your site? Only the 4 latest articles show up on the home page and then when you add the 5th article, SharePoint automatically creates what is effectively your News Archive. If you don't mind the articles visible in search, that would be the quickest and easiest way to make the news less visible but still accessible.

Same here.  I was able to add the Promoted State, but when I click Quick Edit, it removes that column from the view (as if it was read only).  It removed the Number of comments and likes columns too.

For 90% of the items, allowing rotation would work, but there are current news that our client only wants to display for a day, then remove it.  (never simple), so we will look into a small Flow to pause until expiration Date, then set 2 to 0.

 

 

Saving the view kept the columns in view for future, but as Christopher mentioned, that removes the quickedit button.

If you are adding the PromotedState to the ByAuthor view, you will not get the Quick Edit, since Quick edit will not show up on view with Grouped items. You should first select the All Items view, then add the PromotedState, then save your view to something new. 

 

Also note that I do not thin that the Promoted State is working any more for news articles, at least on a communications site I am working on. I have changed Pages to PromotedState=0, however they still show up in my news reel. The only way to hide them is to unpublish or delete. I have also recently noticed issues with the Highlighted Content web part also and it's query rules. 

 

 

There is a known issue with page indexing right now they are testing a fix for. That is what's causing all this strange behavior with news pages showing / not showing including highlighted content web part.

Thanks for the insight Chris, do you happen to have a link that discusses this more in detail? I had to re-align a few things recently due to this issue going on and any info from MS would be helpful.

 

I am hoping that they improve the Highlighted Content web with changing the ability on controlling the look and feel. I had to recently write an extension to hide something on that web-part that I wish I could remove out of the box.

It's on the System Status page in the 365 admin portal under SharePoint Online.

@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"

Card_and_Carousel.png

HERE'S THE STEPS:

  1. 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"
  2. Create a Date Column in the Site Pages library.  Title this column "Highlight Expires"
  3. 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.
  4. Go to the page you want to reveal these items on, and add a Highlighted Content web part to the page.
  5. Configure it as I have in the screen capture.

HighlightedContent.png

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!

 

Hi Susan et al,

 

Is there a recommended way to turn on a retention , or rather a disposition , policy for news articles ?

 

i.e. so that they will automatically be deleted e.g. after 2 years? 

 

In SP Online - Do the retention policies need to be first set in the Security and Compliance Centre; where we define a "label" with "no , just delete content that's older than" checked and specify 2 years.

 image.png

Then we apply the label to the "site pages" library in the Comms site? 

 

Thanks,

Colm

Hi Colm,

You can definitely do this. Define your label in the Security & Compliance Center with the retention setting to delete after 2 years. If you want it to only apply to news articles then it's best to base it on when it was labeled rather than when it's created. This is because you only want to apply the label to new articles and not necessarily ALL site pages. You will leave it up to the end-user to apply the label to the news article thru the SharePoint UI. (below)

 

You will need to publish the label to all site collection(s) you want to use the label. Although you *can* default the entire site pages library to have the label, if you only want the news article pages to be deleted after 2 years, you will need the end-user to manually apply the retention label to each news article page. Note: you cannot currently see the Label property in the new Page details property, you have to be in the Site Pages library, select the news page and apply the label from the information pane.

 

ApplyLabeltoPage.png

Hope that helps. 

Joanne Klein

1 best response

Accepted Solutions
best response confirmed by JHerschel (Iron Contributor)
Solution

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. 

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