How To Recreate A SharePoint Navigation Bar with FrontPage 2003

Today just a little trick that I needed when I started to customize SharePoint sites with FrontPage 2003. One of the first things you'll probably be doing when you want to alter how a SharePoint site looks, is deleting some table rows and cells from the default SharePoint layout. Sometimes it happens that you (accidentally?) delete one element too much… (at least it happened to me!). A tricky one to get back is the SharePoint navigation bar on top of the screen. To imitate the “real” one you can paste following HTML into your page:
<table class="ms-bannerframe" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="100%" height="25px">
  <tr>
     <td class=ms-banner width=100% nowrap ID="myNavigationBar" valign="middle">
       <!--webbot bot="Navigation"
                S-Type="sequence"
                S-Orientation="horizontal"
                S-Rendering="html"
                S-Btn-Nml="<a ID='onettopnavbar#LABEL_ID#' href='#URL#' accesskey='J'>#LABEL#</a>"
                S-Btn-Sel="<a ID='onettopnavbar#LABEL_ID#' href='#URL#' accesskey='J'>#LABEL#</a>"
                S-Btn-Sep="&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;"
                B-Include-Home="FALSE"
                B-Include-Up="FALSE"
                S-Btn-Nobr="FALSE"
                U-Page="sid:1002"
                S-Target -->
     </td>
  </tr>
</table>

But you can be a little more creative too by creating your own navigation bar. From the Insert menu in FrontPage, choose the “Navigation…” menu item. A new window will show up in which you can choose what type of navigation bar you want; for now let’s choose a “Bar with custom links”.

Click Next so you can choose the style in which you want to display the navigation links. In the last screen of the wizard you select the orientation of the navigation bar (I’ve chosen vertical). In the link bar properties window you can add links to the navigation bar; if you choose “SharePoint Top NavBar” you’ll get all the links of the default navigation bar. That’s it, The vertical navigation bar is finished! If you want do dig deeper into SharePoint customization with FrontPage, take a look at Yves Kerwyn's blog post about this topic.

8 Comments

  • I bet that produces lovely HTML... Couldn't you have just given out some real education in the form of HTML/CSS? It's really easy to make one of the bars using an unordered list, and it opens the way for some amazing things.



    Still, it sure looks purdy :)

  • I'm having my problems with the Create a SharePoint web site in FP 2003. Why on earth would you want to go to all this trouble (as showed in the blog link you had) when all you have to do is to in a browser do Create Web Site.



    Or is what he gets at the end of all his deleting and adding back in something special ? It doesn't look that way to me.

  • Colin, feel free to do so! I have to admit: at first a was sceptical about using FrontPage too. But I really suggest you'd give it a try, especially in combination with SharePoint.



    Mike, Yves wanted to show how you can recreate things. The final result will of course be the same! He doesn't do this all the time, only if you need some customized stuff. Actually Yves posted the transcript of a SharePoint Customization TechNet session that he did together with Patrick Tisseghem and me.

  • Oh, I use FP 2003 (mostly Data View) all the time so I have no problems using that.



    I just don't see the point of using it to Create a Web Site - so if all it was was an example of how powerful FP 2003 it fails completely for me.



    Now if he'd done something I couldn't do in the WSS UI I might be more interested !

  • How do you maker a dropdown menu in navigation bar ?

  • I am having some &quot;blog envy&quot;



    How can I create the same blogs that you have in sharepoint..



    I have been looking on line...



    do tell!



    -karen angelli

  • Do you know what makes SharePoint Navigation Bar appear on all the sharepoint pages. I want to have a menu or preferably the quick launch bar appear on all of sharepoint pages on my site just like the Sharepoint top Navbar does. Do you know how to accomplish that?

  • A colleague deleted a form library on our main SharePoint site and now we don't have the SharePoint Top Nav Bar. The code is there when you look in FrontPage, and you can recreate it in FrontPage, but it doesn't retain the changes. Our subsites still have their top nav bars.

    Is there a quick fix? We have to present this site tomorrow!

    Thank you

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