How do I add the top link navigaton bar to the Enterprise Search Center?

Question

The Enterprise Search Center appears to use the minimal master page, and has no top link navigation. This seems a bit silly and is hard to use if you use the Search Center as a subsite in a larger site collection. How do I add the top link navigation bar to the Search Center?

Answer 1

Credit to KolbyH at the MSDN forums for pointing me in the right direction here. There is some sort of weird master page setup in the Search Center, but you can get around this without too much trouble:

1. Create the Search Center
2. Open the Search Center in SharePoint designer, go to Master Pages and open "minimal.master"
3. Add the following code to the page, right before the div that contains PageHolderTitleBreadcrumb:

_

<!-- Add to minimal.master before the div containing PlaceHolderTitleBreadcrumb to add top navigation to Enterprise Search Center -->
<div class="s4-lp s4-toplinks" style="padding-top:5px; padding-bottom:5px; background-image:url(/_layouts/images/selbg.png); background-repeat:no-repeat;
background-color:#f6f6f6; vertical-align:middle; min-height:25px; border-top:1px solid #e0e0e0;
border-bottom:1px solid #b8babd">
    <asp:ContentPlaceHolder id="PlaceHolderTopNavBar" runat="server">
    <h2 class="ms-hidden" style="width: 14px; height: 14px">
    <SharePoint:EncodedLiteral runat="server" text="<%$Resources:wss,topnav_pagetitle%>" EncodeMethod="HtmlEncode"/></h2>
            <asp:ContentPlaceHolder id="PlaceHolderHorizontalNav" runat="server">
<SharePoint:AspMenu
  ID="TopNavigationMenuV4"
  Runat="server"
  EnableViewState="false"
  DataSourceID="topSiteMap"
  AccessKey="<%$Resources:wss,navigation_accesskey%>"
  UseSimpleRendering="true"
  UseSeparateCss="false"
  Orientation="Horizontal"
  StaticDisplayLevels="2"
  MaximumDynamicDisplayLevels="1"
  SkipLinkText=""
  CssClass="s4-tn"/>
<SharePoint:DelegateControl runat="server" ControlId="TopNavigationDataSource" Id="topNavigationDelegate">
    <Template_Controls>
        <asp:SiteMapDataSource
          ShowStartingNode="False"
          SiteMapProvider="SPNavigationProvider"
          id="topSiteMap"
          runat="server"
          StartingNodeUrl="sid:1002"/>
    </Template_Controls>
</SharePoint:DelegateControl>
                        </asp:ContentPlaceHolder>
                </asp:ContentPlaceHolder>
</div>

Save the page and right-click minimal.master -> "Set as Custom Master Page". All pages on your Search Center should now have Top Link Navigation.

You may also have to right-click v4.master and "Set as Default Master Page". For some reason v4.master is the default master page, but the search page layouts use a custom master page.

Answer 2

This did the job for me: http://blogs.kraftkennedy.com/index.php/2010/08/25/branding-sharepoint-2010-search-centers/