2010 Team Site with Publishing enabled: navigation issues

Question

We're using SharePoint 2010 Standard and have a scenario in which there is a Team Site with Publishing Features enabled. We have a custom Masterpage (a slightly modified version of v4.master - with additional bespoke controls) and custom CSS.

The issue is that in any site other than the top level of a site collection, the Top Navigation control seems to ignore the Navigation settings on content pages.

The custom master page is set as the System Master page as well as the Site Master Page (required for Team site) and all Navigation changes appear perfectly on any pages in the _layouts folder. However, any pages created by users (by default set to a type of 'Wiki Page' - which as far as I know uses the ~14/TEMPLATE/DocumentTemplates/wkpstd.aspx template) don't display the correct navigation.

The Navigation displayed is as follows:

• Top Level Site Collection (correct): HomeLink [manually created link], Link1, Link2, Link3, Link4
• Subsite: HomeLink (incorrect, since the settings are set to 'inherit from parent')

All Navigation settings are correct and have been double checked and tested in other environments.

Does anyone have any idea why this may not be working? We've checked for conflicting or overriding PlaceHolders in all the templates which we thought could be being used but can't find anything referencing the standard PlaceHolders we're using (PlaceHolderTopNavBar and PlaceHolderHorizontalNav).

The controls being used to render the menu are the defaults:

<SharePoint:AspMenu ID="TopNavigationMenuV4"
Runat="server" EnableViewState="false"
DataSourceID="topSiteMap"
AccessKey="<%$Resources:wss,navigation_accesskey%>"
UseSimpleRendering="true" UseSeparateCss="false"
Orientation="Horizontal" StaticDisplayLevels="5"
MaximumDynamicDisplayLevels="0" SkipLinkText=""
CssClass="s4-tn" />

<asp:SiteMapDataSource ShowStartingNode="False"
SiteMapProvider="GlobalNavSiteMapProvider"
id="topSiteMap" runat="server" />

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

This is probably a known issue which is my intuitive guess as I have exactly faced the same situation before while creating a consistent navigation thats common across entire farm while all the site collections were team site using publishing features. Back then the thing that made it work was a farm level override which was not a very good approach but we went with it.

We made the exact changes to the topnavbar user control residing in

"C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\14\TEMPLATE\CONTROLTEMPLATES\TopNavBar.ascx"

to match it with the masterpage topnavbar source code.

Answer 2

OK, we finally figured out what was causing the problem.

As a result of enabling the Publishing Feature on the Team Site, the navigation settings change.

In our master page (based on a Team Site v4.master), the top menu control was configured to use a DataSource returning a SiteMapDataSource object. However, since enabling the Publishing feature, we needed to use GlobalNavigation, which is actually a PortalSiteMapProvider, which requires that you generate a PortalSiteMapProvider object as your DataSource for the AspMenu control (if you're using this).

Therefore, we replaced the asp:SiteMapDataSource code above with:

PublishingNavigation:PortalSiteMapDataSource
    StartFromCurrentNode="true"
    ShowStartingNode="false"
    SiteMapProvider="GlobalNavigation"
    id="topSiteMap"
    runat="server"

We are now able to use the navigation as intended.