In hooking up the SharePoint 2013 navigation to the term store, I found a few bugs at least in the current early preview version (I’m using the Office 2013 cloud version, let me know if you find the same behavior in a local install).

• The term driven navigation ONLY seems to work with publishing sites – if you try it with a collaboration site, the navigation doesn’t appear at all.
• There seems to be some caching going on between the term store and the site.  I created a term called “test” in my term set, deleted it, and it was still showing up in the Navigation.  I had the same experience when I switched the page linking from the term from the default Page Not Found to a specific page – it took a few seconds to work from the navigation.
• In refreshing the page, I was able to generate this error below:

• While SharePoint 2013 automatically generates a term in your navigation term set if you create a page, it doesn’t work the other way around.  If you click on any term without hooking it up to a page, you will get a page not found by default, or the page inherited from its term set parent.  This means that if I have a large number of terms and I want to create pages for each term, I have to create each page manually, link them up in the term set (under the navigation tab) and populate the content.  This seems like a very tedious task for cases where I have an existing catalogue of items (think for example of creating a product catalogue).

This post was written by Chris Woodill
Christopher Woodill is the Vice President, Public Sector for Navantis. With over 15 years of experience planning, managing and implementing technology strategies in both the public and private sector, Christopher is responsible for public sector sales, strategy and delivery of solutions for our clients in healthcare, government, municipalities and education.