SharePoint 2013 has officially landed and has some great features. I work for SusQtech and most of the work we do is based around the WCM space with heavy customization for LOB application. Having spent some time (J) playing with SharePoint 2013 I have been really impressed with the new WCM updates and features. The main ones I like are:
- Term Set and Term Navigation – You are here
- Cross Site Collection Publishing
- Search Engine Site Map
- Content Search (see previous post: http://blog.helloitsliam.com/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=86)
- Device Channels
Each of these are very important for the work I do and really are very useful for everyone when working with SharePoint 2013. The first one, Term Set and Term Navigation is great, finally we are able to build navigation using term values. You can access this from the navigation link in the site.
Accessing this link will display the various types of navigation available. As you can see you can choose to keep the standard SharePoint way or switch it to the metadata navigation.
For my site here I am using the Managed Metadata option.
From here you are able to build the terms out, ensure pages are added and a very little feature "Create Friendly URLS for new pages automatically". Once this is set you are then able to decide whether or not the ribbon bar should be shown.
So to look at modified one I have created the following by adding new terms to the term set using the Term Store Manager. When the terms are added you can set the properties as shown below:
When I return to my publishing site the navigation now adopts the correct links:
So great feature for building out the navigation, but it has even more features. If you select a term and then Term Driven Pages you get the following:
This will actually create a friendly URL link that is unique to the term so when the navigation item is clicked it actually goes to that whatever link you defined in the target link shown below:
You can also perform the same approach for the actual category, so the parent container for the navigation nodes. With this set above when I now access my link in the core site is actually shows the following:
When I click the link however it goes to the following URL:
This feature allows for a great consistent and easily managed navigation as well as friendly URLs for the entire navigation without having to write custom code or use managed paths to do this. To ensure that SEO is met, you are also able to set properties for the links and pages.
Great tools to ensure you navigation is consistent with the rest of your SEO policy for the site. In the next few posts I will work though my list of WCM features that I like.