Why can't I select a page in my website when using SXA?

Question

I have created a new SXA site (using Sitecore Experience Accelerator 1.1 rev. 161004 for 8.2.zip) and I've created several different pages (inside of Content Editor). I'm trying to use the Navigation component to provide a sub-navigation menu. So I go to the Control Properties, and go to the Navigation Settings to select a Start Page. When I click on the down arrow to select my start page, none of the pages show up underneath my Home node. Here's what I'm seeing:

• Is there some kind of security that I bypassed when creating those pages in content editor?
• How can I get any pages to show up underneath the Home node?

Answer 1

Answer 1

No there is no security. You did everything fine

Explanation:

When you open following item: /sitecore/templates/Feature/Experience Accelerator/Navigation/Rendering Parameters/Navigation/Navigation Settings/NavigationRoot you will notice that inside Source field there is following token query:$home.

This token should be resolved to start item of your site. Nothing else special here, standard Droptree field with dynamic source

Answer 2

My theory is that you created your site on SXA 1.0.

There was an issue in site scaffolding and not all fields were populated correctly.

Solution:

Navigate to your site definition item (/sitecore/content/Group/Tenant/site/Settings/Site Grouping/site) and make sure that Start Item field is set.

I suppose that in your case it is not, thus you can see not your Home item but default Sitecore Home item because $home token in Navigation Rendering Parameters was incorrectly resolved.

You can also notice that by looking at the Home item icon as well. SXA home template icon is slightly different.

Closing Words

In SXA 1.1 this issue has been resolved and you no longer need to define Star Item manually.

Additional solution

This solution is for people who could not solve their issue with the solution provided above.

There is some rare case when, even if you have got everything configured properly your site is resolved incorrectly, thus some functionalities might not work as expected (navigation is a great example).

How do I know if I am experiencing that extra case

Assuming that you configured everything like I described above and you open a page using Experience Editor button from Content Editor and gets sc_site query parameter with website value or value different than your site definition item name then you've got a problem.

How to mitigate this:

To mitigate that issue you have to reconfigure standard Sitecore website a little bit. What we want is rootPath property cannot be a substring of any other SXA based sites rootPath.

Default value isrootPath="/sitecore/content" and we need to make it more unique, for example rootPath="/sitecore/content/default".

Then you have to create any item under /sitecore/content and move default Sitecore Home item there.

Summary

This is a workaround for a small issue that we've found with @keith-vanderveen in site info resolution logic.

This issue should be fixed in the next release of SXA.

Affected versions:

SXA 1.0, SXA 1.1