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.

An easy way to accomplish Home navigation links regardless of the path of your site collection

Most of my team mates deploy project solutions to http://project.server.local/ which means all links used in the solution can be prefixed with “/” and everything is related to the root path and works just fine.

I’m different and use http://server.local/sites/project. And of course all links going to root for me will go to http://server.local instead of http://server.local/sites/project.

The solution, at least for global nav in master pages etc. is to make use of the variable _spPageContextInfo, blogged by numerous people. This object holds several properties about the current page/item you are viewing (see _spPageContextInfo is your new best friend by Sahil Malik for a complete property listing).

The code below is a sample of a hyperlink on an image to the front page of the current site collection.