During the Beta releases of MOSS07, master pages contained a field control activated on sites that are part of a variation hierarchy. This control exposes a selection option that permits users to directly access any site within the variation hierarchy to which they have access permissions.
Designers frequently do not want the clutter of displaying all the variation label sites in the navigation of their pages. In Site Settings > Navigation, you can hide sites in Global and Current Navigation displays including the root of the variation so that the user only sees the site to which his browser was redirected. However, to view other variation labels, the user would have to type the correct URL.
This control permitted hiding the variation label sites in all navigations but still giving users the ability to select sites directly without modifying their browser settings or knowing the exact URL. For example, if a user was redirected by the VariationRootPageLayout.aspx to the French site based on the language settings of Internet Explorer, the user could still view the German site using the picker menu. FYI, the product team calls this a flag control.
This control required one or more trips to the database each time a page was loaded and was removed prior to RTM to improve performance.
However, the functionality is still available, it is merely commented out in the page and can easily be “re-activated” for your sites if you wish.
The file to be modified is _controltemplates\variationslabelmenu.aspx in IIS admin console or C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\CONTROLTEMPLATES\ variationslabelmenu.aspx on my server.
The code for the page is as follows (important line is in red):
<%@ Control Language="C#" %>
<%@Assembly Name="Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c"%>
<%@Register TagPrefix="CMS" Assembly="Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" namespace="Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.WebControls"%>
<%-- <cms:VariationsLabelEcbMenu id ="varlabelmenu1" DataSourceID="LabelMenuDataSource" DisplayText="<%$Resources:cms,VariationLabelMenuTitle%>" IsCallbackMode="true" runat="server" /> --%>
<cms:VariationDataSource id="LabelMenuDataSource" LabelMenuConfiguration="1" Filter="" runat="server"/>
<%@ Control Language="C#" %>
<%@Assembly Name="Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c"%>
<%@Register TagPrefix="CMS" Assembly="Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" namespace="Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.WebControls"%>
If you remove the “<%--“ “ --%>” tags and save the file, the control will now appear on your master page.