Top Links added on a SharePoint site are not showing up for any user.

Scenario:

Client has a SharePoint publishing site in which he tries to add top links for global navigation. In spite of adding them, they do not show up on the site.

Ticket Analysis:

Since this was a publishing site, it had a 'Pages' Library. This library ideally contains pages created using publishing layouts. Client had used this library to store aspx/asp/html pages created using SharePoint designer. As per the navigation settings, ‘Show Pages’ section was checked which showed pages from the ‘Pages’ library. One of these custom pages were throwing errors while rendering their links on the navigation  and hence the rest of the working top links refused to show up.

Solution:

I advised client to

1) Move these pages to some other library.

2) Use Pages library to only store publishing pages.

3) Until then, uncheck the 'Show Pages' option.

4) once done, top links started showing up.

STSADM -- Activate Publishing/ Publishing activation - access denied error / Greyed out link - Modify Navigation

stsadm -o activatefeature -filename publishing\feature.xml -url http://<site_url>/sites/Vogue -force

stsadm -o activatefeature -filename publishingresources\feature.xml -url http://<site_url>/sites/Vogue -force

stsadm -o activatefeature -filename publishingSite\feature.xml -url http://<site_url>/sites/Vogue -force (activating on site collection level)

stsadm -o activatefeature -filename publishingweb\feature.xml -url http://<site_url>/sites/Vogue -force (activating on root site level)

stsadm -o activatefeature -filename publishinglayouts\feature.xml -url http://<site_url>/sites/Vogue -force

stsadm -o activatefeature -filename navigation\feature.xml -url http://<site_url>/sites/Vogue -force

use stsadm command line utility when: -

• Clicking on activate/deactivate link for publishing doesn't activate publishing on site/web level.
• Activating publishing through SharePoint UI gives 'access denied' error.

Access denied error during publishing activation is due to the reason that Publishing Resources are not activated on MOSS firs installation. hence we can manually do it using this utility (see above commands).

At times, you will notice that a publishing site has a number of grayed out links in Site actions: for e.g. 'Modify Navigation'. I was able to replicate this issue, when I ran the first command from above list. Publishing was incompletely activated and hence modify navigation link was grayed out. As soon as I ran the second command (publishingresources) the option became available.