atlas by clearpeople

Modern Team Sites and Pages Behind the Scenes

  

In this article, I will talk about Modern Team Sites and Pages, as these have been available for a while in our Office 365 tenants.

 

Modern Experiences introduction

First of all, I will do a quick introduction to the “Modern experiences” and later, we will see with much detail the “guts”, and how these Modern experiences are stored behind the scenes.

Modern experiences in SharePoint Online is a new user experience, available at 3 levels:
  1. Modern Team Sites
  2. Modern list and library experiences
  3. Modern Site Pages

This new experience is much more user-friendly, with better authoring capabilities, faster, and completely responsive, multi-device and multi-browser.

Modern Experiences

What’s supported and what’s not with Modern Team Sites

So far, Modern Team Sites are quite limited about customisations. There’s not much information about a possible roadmap from Microsoft, but it seems that Microsoft is working to provide different alternatives to customise them.

What’s supported and what’s not with Modern Team Sites

Creating Modern Team Sites

In order to create new Modern Team Sites, we have different options. Considering that a Modern Team Site is always mapped with an Office 365 group, we can create an Office 365 group using Outlook web UI, as we can see in the image below:

Create a Modern Team Site

Once the group is created, we can access the Modern Team Site from the “Site” link in the group nav-bar.

 

Modern Team Site


We can also create a Modern Team Site using code, and here, as usual, PnP components will help us with a new PowerShell command:

 

Create Modern Team Site PowerShell command

 

Creating Modern Pages

Once we have our Modern Team Site created, we are ready to create Modern Pages from SharePoint UI, and enjoy the new experience, much more fluid and easy to use.

 

SharePoint Modern page

Modern Pages are stored in the “Site pages” library, like any other page in a team site. However, Modern Pages have a specific content type “Site page” and therefore, different fields.

 

SharePoint site pages library

Besides, a Modern Page has a specific “Page Layout Type,” in this case: Article.

But, how is the content of a Modern Page stored? Well, all the page content is stored in the same Field, called “Authoring Canvas Content”, and the content here is pure HTML, where every widget is surrounded with a DIV tag. That DIV tag contains an attribute “data-sp-controldata”.

 

DIV tag data-sp-controldata

And in that “data-sp-controldata” attribute, with some specific encoding, all the widget configuration is stored, following a JSON format. For instance, the image below contains a JSON snippet of the “Hero” widget:

 

JSON snippet Hero widget

 

Summary

Modern experiences are here to stay. They offer a much better user experience, faster, and multi-device. So far, they are quite limited though when thinking on customisations, but Microsoft is working hard to offer new and better ways to do that. Besides, the PnP program is already offering some helpers and utilities to provision Modern Team Sites.

Author bio

Luis Mañez

Luis Mañez

Luis is Atlas Chief Architect. He is also a Microsoft 365 Development MVP and SharePoint and Cloud Solutions architect. "I help find the best technical designs to meet client needs and act as tech lead to build great solutions. I have fun with some R&D tasks, always trying to improve our tools and processes, and I often help the Microsoft community as a blogger and speaker, contributing to open-source projects."

View all articles by this author View all articles by this author

Get our latest posts in your inbox