How to create a hierarchy of pages?

Question

Just started using sharepoint and it seems quite user friendly. For example, on the left bar, there is a "[+ Add new page" link. It then presents a dialog that lets me name my name page. The problem is how to a setup a hierarchy of pages? So in my new page "Sales", how do I create a sub page called "Q1", a page called "Q2"? And then have it accessible within "Sales"? If I press the new page again, it just creates it at the top level under "Site pages".

Answer 1

Pages are stored within Libraries, and Libraries are stored within Sites.

This hierarchy is strict, and you cannot store Libraries within Libraries, or Pages directly in Sites.

Therefore, you need to decide if you only want to infer a hierarchy of pages via visible links within the page content, or if you need to enforce a strict hierarchy using multiple sub-websites.

So, an example hierarchy using sites could look like this (Note that Pages is a library):

Top-Level Site
 - Pages
   - Sales
 - Sub Site 1
    - Pages
      - Q1
 - Sub Site 2
    - Pages
      - Q2
 - Sub Site 3
    - Pages
      - Q3

Of course this might be overkill, so if you just had a flat page hierarchy, looking like this:

Top-Level Site
 - Pages
   - Sales
     - Q1
     - Q2
     - Q3

And you just directly have links to Q1, Q2 and Q3 form within Sales, and back up.

The final alternative is to have one website but with multiple libraries, like this:

Top-Level Site
 - Sales Pages
 - Q1 Pages
 - Q2 Pages
 - Q3 Pages
 - Q4 Pages

Note that this only works for 'Wiki Libraries' and not 'Publishing Portals'. The easy way to see which kind of site you're working with is whether or not hte homepage has 'Pages' in the URL, or if it has 'SitePages'. If it has the latter, you're working with a Wiki based site, and you can have multiple Wiki libraries in a site. But with a Publishing Portal, you can only have one 'Pages' library per sub web site.

Note: the last paragraph applies to SharePoint 2010

Answer 2

If you go with OOTB SharePoint navigation: For creating hierarchy N levels deep(where N>1) , you will need to create N-1 subsites one under another. The pages come at Nth level.

• For 2 level hierarchy, you can create a subsite Sales and two pages Q1 and Q2 in any document library.

• For 3 level hierarchy, Create a subsite Sales,under that create subsite Q1 and two pages Q1results and Q1Profit in it.

and so on...

If you don't want to go with subsites, create hierarchy in a XML and consume it with XMLSiteMapProvider.

Answer 3

Correct me if I am wrong here, but with SharePoint 2010, creating a Wiki Page does not give the option of selecting the folder to save the page in. It will always be created in the "Site Pages" folder.

Of course at some point we can move these pages to another library that contains a structure of folders. The problem here is that the URL of these pages will change after the move. Besides, it would be a cumbersome moving pages to their new locations every time they are created.