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Working with Web Part Pages Tip #2 - Creating self-maintaining Web Part Page navigation

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Here is the second tutorial in my “Web Part Pages” series.

In this post I will describe a simple way to add navigation between the web part pages you created in the first tutorial. The great bit about this approach to navigation is that it is completely self-maintaining, all you do is set it up once, then it will accurately reflect the current pages in your site forever more.

To get things started just follow the below steps to add the navigation to our area or team site home page.

1. Open the page in design mode.
2. Modify Shared Page -> Add Web Parts -> Browse
3. In the list you should now find a web part that maps back to the document library you created in the first tutorial, I called it “Pages”.

Add Navigation

4. Drag and drop the document library web part onto your home page, here is the basis of your navigation web part. This works because as described in the first tutorial all web part pages live inside a document library, therefore any web page page added to the document library will automatically appear in this web part. In my first tutorial I described keeping these web part pages in a separate document library to other documents, and this is a good reason why.

Navigation Basic

5. From here you probably need to spend a little time modifying the view to look the way you want, for example in my humble opinion the below looks much better!

NavigationNew

6. Of course you could also go even further, removing the column titles using FrontPage for example. When you have it looking the way you like, you can simply export the web part to a DWP file, then import it onto any page within the site you like to add navigation.

Stay tuned for the next exciting Web Part Page installment!

Comments

  • Anonymous
    May 11, 2005
    cannot wait for the next step...
  • Anonymous
    May 11, 2005
    Good write up Daniel. Just a hint to add based on my own experiences with this approach - I also have found it useful to:

    A) Display "Name (for use in forms)" in my nav view so that as I add new pages the "New" icon doesn't appear - plus I find bolding of my nav works well.

    B)Add a sort order column to your library so that you can customize the order of your navigational links with relative ease.

    Again good job on post!