Sneak peek at managed navigation for HUB sites

Photo by Cédric Servay at Unsplash

One of the cool features of the new hub sites is that associated sites inherit the navigation of the hub. This means you have one place to configure navigation, and you don’t have to resort to any of the numerous custom solutions out there to solve this. Hub sites makes it very easy to create small hierarchies of sites with a common navigation structure.

A lesser known fact is that the hub navigation also support managed navigation, a popular way to configure navigation since its inception in SharePoint 2013, and something constantly asked for in modern sites.

This post will show that you can achieve it today, but you should probably wait until it’s properly supported.

Working with Hub Sites and the search API

Photo by Sunaina Kamal at Unsplash.

Hub sites are a nice way to create a virtual two level site hierarchy without using sub sites. An administrator will nominate a site as a hub site, and then other sites can associate themselves to this hub. By associating a site to a hub the site will inherit the navigation and the visual look of the hub itself, ensuring a consisting look and feel. Also items from associated sites will surface in search at the hub level (as long as you have read access to the item).

Note: The hub site feature is currently in preview and only available for target release tenant at the time of writing.

After playing with hub sites you might want your favorite developer to create something for your hub sites, and this is where the search API is handy.