Why Your Community Hub Navigation Menu Won't Stay in Order

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Learnings

You've set up your Community Hub, configured your navigation menu items, and everything looks perfect. Then you deploy to another environment or, worse, a consitutent logs in, and the menu items are in a completely different order than what you specified. Welcome to one of Community Hub's sneakier challenges.

Blank and Duplicate Sort Orders

The most common culprit we see? Sort Order values that are either blank or duplicated across multiple menu items. Community Hub will slot blank values first, which usually means your carefully planned menu starts with whatever items happen to have no sort order assigned — pushing everything else down.

When multiple items share the same sort order value, the tie-breaking behavior isn't documented in any way that I'd call reliable. Best to make the numbers unique.

Multiple Community Hub Gotchas

For orgs with multiple Community Hubs: there are two different Sort Order fields in the mix. One lives on the Navigation Menu Item custom metadata type (CMT). The other lives on the Community Navigation Link CMT.

You'd think both would have an effect and one would take precedence over the other. From our testing, the Sort Order on Community Navigation Link has zero impact on the actual menu order — at least for Account navigation menu items. The only one that appears to matter is the Sort Order on Navigation Menu Item.

If you only have one Community Hub, you're not going to have Community Navigation Links.

Additionally, if you're running multiple Community Hub sites, keep in mind that a single Navigation Menu Item CMT record can be shared across communities. Change the sort order for one community, and you might be rearranging the nav in another without realizing it.

To keep things isolated, you can create distinct navigation menu item records for each community. It adds a bit of overhead, but it gives you full control over each site's menu independently.

Does Your Org Need Resorting?

Navigation menu ordering in Community Hub looks simple on the surface. There's a Sort Order field — just fill it in, right? But there's more going on than meets the eye.

There are a couple other gotchas that Seawalker Tech has encountered, but we’ve always been able to fix this for clients. Nimble AMS is our exclusive focus here at Seawalker, so we have a very deep knowledge of all its strengths, challenges, and quirks.

If your menu is giving you trouble, we've been through it. Reach out and we can pinpoint what's going on pretty quickly.