Only show current submenu in current navigation

Question

For a client I'm developing a public facing SharePoint site. I'm using Managed Metadata. Let's say I have the following term set:

 - Home
 - Products
    - Product A
    - Product B
    - Product C
 - Brands
    - Brand A
    - Brand B

The site has a horizontal global navigation, which will only show the first level of the navigation nodes ("Home", "Products" and "Brands"). When I click on Products a seperate vertical navigation should be displayed with only the subitems ("Product A", "Product B", "Product C"). How can this be achieved? I tried using the current navigation snippet in the Page Layout, but it will always start from the top level. When I hide the first level with CSS, "Brand A" and "Brand B" are still displayed as if they were subitems of Products. I tried setting StartFromCurrentNode and ShowStartingNode in all possible combinations, but to no avail. In the term set manager it's possible to disable "Products" to be displayed in the current navigation, but this will cause all subitems to be hidden in the current navigation.

So my question is: how can I create a vertical navigation which only shows the subnavigation items? Anyone suggestions how to achieve this with OOTB SharePoint functionality?

Edit: image to describe what I want to achieve

Answer 1

Okay finally got this figured out. Consider the following example:

- Home
- Products
   - Product A
   - Product B
   - Product C
- Brands
    - Brand A
    - Brand B

When you use a OOTB Vertical Navigation snippet in your masterpage or page layout then it will always show items starting from the current level. So the trick is to link the "Products" menuitem (in the managed metadata) to the the first product page ("Product A" in above example) instead of a seperate products page.

To do this, do the following:

1. Go to Site Settings;
2. Click on Navigation;
3. Select "Open Term Store Management Tool" and navigate to your sitecollection navigation;
4. Select the "Products" page (the parent item which contains the child pages);
5. Go to the tab "Navigation". Under "Navigation Node Type" select "Simple Link or Header". Enter the relative URL to the first child item (fe. "/en/products/product_a").

As far as I could see it was not possible to modify the OOTB Vertical Navigation snippet in a way that it will show only second level menu items. It will always show the navigation from the current level.

When you click on "Products" the Vertical Navigation will show the entire tree ("Home", "Products", "Products A", etc.). If you don't want this and you don't want the "Products" menu item to link to the "Product A" page but to it's own page, then there is another workaround. This workaround uses a Content Query Web Part. Do the following:

1. Query for the product page;
2. Modify the ContentQueryMain.xsl/ItemStyle.xsl to turn it into a menu;
3. Export the web part and upload it into the list of Web Parts (Edit Page > Insert > Web Part > Upload);
4. Go to the Snippet Manager and generate a snippet out of your custom CQWP;
5. Paste that snippet in your master page/page layout ...

... And you're good to go.

Answer 2

You can make the Left Navigation styles with your custom master page :

• For Vertical Menu : Quick launch (Left navigation) styles in SharePoint 2013
• For Horizontal Menu : Customizing SharePoint 2013 global navigation with CSS and jQuery