Creating Modern Pages in Classic SharePoint sites

The SharePoint estate in my organization still has a lot of content in Classic sites. Over past few years Microsoft has updated a lot of pages to modern look and feel. For example, the site content page or modern lists, all are available in the classic sites.

However the content pages created in classic site are still the same. This gives a very bad user experience as user can keep jumping back and forth between these templates.

Best option is to migrate all your content to a modern site. However it may not always be feasible to migrate everything as of now and I wanted to create few modern pages within the classic sites. 

First thing you should do to make this happen is to enable the site pages feature in the site. Before you try to do that, check if you have a site pages library in the site content. If its there, the feature may already be activated. If not, go to Site Settings -> Manage Site Features and select the Site pages feature as shown below:

Once this is done go back and check if you have Site Pages library

Here in the New Item menu, you can see an option to create a site page. When you click on create site page , it creates a page with modern look.

 

It may so happen that even though you have Site Pages in the new menu, you don't see any site page option. All the options available may be classic site page templates.

In such cases the work around is to create a page using this URL:

https://<yourtenant>/sites/Testsite/_layouts/15/createsitepage.aspx

This creates the page in Site pages library in the modern view.

Hope this article helps all the SharePoint developers stuck with a classic site :)

Site and Site Collections

Users are often encountered with questions or statements like:

1.       Do you want a site or a site collection?

    2.       The functionality has to be enabled at Site collection level
    3.       This feature is not available at site level

Site collection and Sites are both containers that store your data. The major difference is Sites can only be created under a Site collection. So in a way Site Collections are parent to Sites.

Due to the above relationship, Sites can and do inherit a lot of features from Site collections but at the same time there are a lot of differences between the two. Web application are one level above site collections. The figure below shows the relationship.

 
 
 
There are many differences between Sites and Site collections like:

·         You can apply quota to Site Collection but can not do it for site

    ·         Search settings can be better managed at Site collections
    ·         URL for Site collections can be more flexible using managed path

You can also create subsites under the sites. Sites are generally used for grouping the content within Site collection and same way subsites can be used to group the content within Sites.

You should consider following scenarios while choosing between site and site collection :

1.       Size – If your data is going to grow large, consider having a site collection. Sites sometimes compete with other sites within its parent site collection.

2.       Branding – If you want to brand your content similar to other Sites/ Site collection, it is a good option to create a Site or sub-site. This way you can easily inherit the branding of your parent site without much effort

3.       Look up list – You can not create look up lists when the data is in different site collection.

4.       Back up  - You can easily back up data if you have stored it in different DB which can be done using different site collection

5.       Security inheritance – You can easily inherit the security permission in a site , but can not be done across site collections

6.       Navigation – Navigation is consistent if you create multiple sites under same site collection.