Lately, several people have asked how to enable the drop-down submenus from the top horizontal menu tabs in SharePoint Server 2007. In this post, I outline how to do this using the out of the box options.
Below, a new site collection based on the Collaboration Portal template and named SharePointRus has been created and the site’s home page is shown. By default, all subsites of the new site collection are shown in the site’s navigation, such as the out-of-the-box Document Center, News, Reports, Search and Sites subsites, denoted by menu tabs in the site’s horizontal menu. The News tab includes drop-down menu links to sample pages within the News site.
This is because the navigational settings on the News site, which is a subsite of the SharePointRus site collection, have been configured to Show pages. To check navigational configuration on the News site, click on the News tab and then, on the News home page click Site Actions > Site Settings > Modify All Site Settings. On the Site Settings page under Look and Feel click Navigation to access the Site Navigation Settings page.
By checking the Show subsites checkbox then the titles of any subsites created directly below the News site will also show in the News drop-down menu. The same settings apply to all subsites. Say if you wanted to show all the subsites created directly under the Site Directory then you’d go to the Site Directory home page (click on Sites in the horizontal navigation) and click Site Actions > Site Settings > Modify All Site Settings, then click on Navigation under Look and Feel, and check the Show subsites checkbox.
Be aware that showing all subsites, for example all subsites created from the Site Directory, can lead to an inordinate number of sites being shown in the drop-down menu! In the case of many sites shown within a drop-down menu where the list will actually run off the page, you’re given the choice of scroll-up and scroll-down controls and this is something else to bear in mind when designing your site navigation.
This post so far has discussed the top level, or root site, navigation settings for site collections. As you create subsite hierarchies throughout your site collection you’ll plan how you want to configure your navigation, such as whether you want to inherit the parent navigation and how you want to display subsites and pages for the current site. Remember that drop-down menus will display the subsites directly below that site. For instance, if we created a new site under the Design site (shown above as a drop-down menu selection on the root site of the SharePointRus site collection) then that site would not display in the same drop-down menu because it would not be a direct descendant of a SharePointRus subsite.
This is demonstrated in the diagram below, which shows a navigational scenario where the navigation on the Site Directory has been configured to (1) Show subsites and (2) not show the parent (root site) navigation but rather the current and sites beneath the Site Directory. By showing subsites, the sites created directly from the Site Directory show in the root site’s drop-down menu and by choosing (2) the subsites of the Site Directory (Design) and those site’s direct descendents (AlsoDesign) are shown in the drop-down menu on the Site Directory site.
Also remember that unless you have the Office SharePoint Server Publishing Feature activated on sites then the option to Show pages on the Site Navigation Settings page on those sites will be disabled.
I hope this has helped to resolve some earlier queries.