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I have created a new site collection of type Enterprise wiki. And I cannot understand the following default navigation setting:

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I mean why I need to use managed navigation to get friendly URLS ? Why can I not use for example structural navigation and still get friendly URLS for my wiki pages?

Can anyone advice, what is the idea of this? I mean managed navigation is different than having friendly URLS, but seems in SP to get friendly URL I need to use managed navigation. I cannot understand the dependency here.

Second question let say I define “Global Navigation” to have Managed Navigation, while Current Navigation uses “Structural Navigation”, in this case I can get friendly url with structural navigation is this correct?

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Structural navigation is tightly coupled with the content and therefore it is hard to create friendly URLs. However, managed metadata navigation addresses this issue by providing central way to manage navigation, irrespective of location of content, which makes it easy to create friendly URLs. The only con, navigation will be managed by term store.

You can always create friendly URLs for existing pages (physical), but it is important that you comprehensively define the term sets/terms hierarchy first. Once all terms are in place, you can simply assign the friendly URLs to all physical pages.

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  • can you adivce more on the following point please :- <<"You can always create friendly URLs for existing pages (physical), but it is important that you comprehensively define the term sets/terms hierarchy first. Once all terms are in place, you can simply assign the friendly URLs to all physical pages." >>,, as i can not understand what is the relation between having a term sets defined and having friendly URLs for my wiki pages, can you adivce more on this ? and how i will be linking the wiki pages with the terms ,, will this be done my managed metadata columns ?
    – John John
    Jun 26, 2015 at 0:44
  • i mean you are saying that i need first to define the term sets/terms first,, but how i can do so,,, as users will be creating new pages and new terms are going to be added accordingly,, so how i can define the term hierarchy first ? and if i define the term hierarchy ,, what about the new pages that are going to be added ???
    – John John
    Jun 26, 2015 at 11:56
  • Yes, you need to defined the term set via term store management, which eventually would drive existing and new pages.
    – Falak Mahmood
    Jun 30, 2015 at 10:58
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If you have a page, "page1.aspx" in the pages library, it can be accessed via:

http://site/pages/page1.aspx.

But, perhaps you would rather be able to access it via:

http://site/page1

The above would require some sort of routing table. This routing table could have been implemented in a variety of ways, but they happened to decide to use a term set for this. So, that's the simple answer to the question: managed navigation means to use a term set, structural navigation says to use the actual page paths for navigation.

While functional, I agree that using a term set to store a routing table adds a good deal of unnecessary complexity.

Edit: so, if you enable this feature after a bunch of pages have been created, to add friendly urls to the existing pages:

  1. go to site settings and open the term store management screen
  2. find the site collection --> site navigation term set
  3. add friendly terms as desired (click the drop down under site navigation or on an existing item to add a subterm, and select "create term")
  4. note that if you switch to the navigation tab for a new term, it will have two options checked "show in global nav" and "show in current nav". Also, it will be marked as a "term-driven page with friendly url", not "simple link". (you shouldn't have to change anything here)
  5. Navigate to the page
  6. on the page tab of the ribbon, click on "Page URLs"
  7. the Page URLs screen should show the physical address (http://site/pages/page1.aspx), and the associated URLs, which should just have a link that says " add a friendly url to this page". click that link, and specify the term you just created.
  8. Test it, when you click on the nav to get to this page, it should now have the friendly url in the address bar of the browser.
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  • ok thanks for the helpful explanation, now in my case i already have a wiki site collection which have its global and current navigation defined as structural navigation. and we already have around 600 wiki pages created, where they can only be accessed using their actual page path such as /pages/123.aspx. Also in my case i have hide the global navigation as per our customer requirements.
    – John John
    Jun 25, 2015 at 15:40
  • so now to enable friendly urls inside my current wiki site collection i did the following; I set the global navigation to use managed navigation instead of structural (even the whole global navigation is hidden in my case !!), this allow new wiki pages to have friendly urls, but existing pages will still have the old non-friednly urls, so is there a way to fix this on existing wiki pages? so they can also be accessed using friendly urls ?
    – John John
    Jun 25, 2015 at 15:41
  • I added steps to the original answer. Also, check your navigation settings and ensure that you have the following options selected: Add new pages to navigation automatically, and Create friendly URLs for new pages automatically
    – Mike2500
    Jun 26, 2015 at 12:56

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