Chapter 11. A Global Navigation Solution Across Site Collections
Have you ever wanted an easier way to have global navigation
that spans across site collections? SharePoint provides an elegant solution
for global navigation within a site collection. However, when you architect
a SharePoint instance to have multiple web apps and site collections, a
global navigation system is not an easy solution to create. A global
navigation system would need to be created on each site collection, and any
changes to the global navigation need to be made in each and every site
collection ...ouch!!! You would think there needs to be a better
solution—and there is!
In this chapter, we will explore one possible solution that allows us
to have the same global navigation across site collections and the ability
to manage it from a central location.
The goal of this solution is to create a global navigation solution
that will be capable of the following:
Deploying once and centrally adding, editing, deleting,
organizing, and managing tabs and their associated pull-down
menus
Controlling the order of tabs and the placement at the beginning
or end of the Top Navigation bar
Adding functionality to have pull-downs with our tabs (SharePoint
2010 Foundation does not provide this functionality)
Allowing pull-down menu items to be pulled from a standard
SharePoint Links list
Ordering and grouping pull-down menu items
Creating tabs or pull-down grouping headers can be links—or
not
Supporting themes for global ...
