Restore Navigate Up on SharePoint 2013

As one of the most popular blog posts ever on our Manage Projects on SharePoint blog, this post, written by my colleague Jonathan Weisglass, will hopefully help the SharePoint community too, or anyone who struggles on the topic! Would love to hear any feedback of comments too. Enjoy! 

*****

With every new version of SharePoint, one of the things that we have to do is work out the implication of various features being pulled or deprecated. You can find a TechNet article on the subject here.

With SharePoint 2013, the removal of the Design view from SharePoint Designer is probably one of the biggest. One that really surprised me was the removal of the Navigate Up menu that replaced the site breadcrumbs in SharePoint 2010. This article will tell you how to bring it back.

This is the Navigate Up menu in a 2010 site.

At BrightWork, we have always seen SharePoint as something that should be structured hierarchically, with parent sites and child sites. It seems that our friends at Microsoft see sites as islands. It may be the ability BrightWork has to report across multiple sites and lists that has made us see SharePoint this way!

Anyway – back to how to bring back the Navigate Up menu to a SharePoint 2013 site. You will needSharePoint Designer 2013 for this. To appreciate it, you should create a hierarchy of a few sites and apply the change to the site at the bottom of the hierarchy.

1. Open the SharePoint 2013 site in SharePoint Designer.
2. Create a copy of the seattle.master.
   Note: It is important that you make a copy for reasons that I explain at the bottom of the post.
   
   
3. Open the seattle_copy(1).master for editing and search for class=”ms-breadcrumb-dropdownBox” – it should be on line 368.
4. Delete the style=”display:none;” at the end of the line.
5. Delete the Visible=”false” immediately underneath.
   Essentially you:
   
6. Click Save.
7. Make the seattle_copy(1).master the default master page.
   
8. Return to your site and refresh. You should now have a Navigate Up menu in the Top-Link bar!

Note: One side effect of making a change like this is that the new Change the Look Feature seems to stop working. As far as I can make out, this will happen if you make a change to the default master page. This is why I got you to make a copy of the master and use that too make your changes.

by Ciara McDonnell via Everyone's Blog Posts - SharePoint Community