Missing websites in the SharePoint flyout menus for everyone but the site collection owner

Recently we had some strange problems with our navigation top navigation in SharePoint.

The problem was that I as a site collection administrator could see all websites in our 3 level deep navigation.
An owner of the root website could only see some of them, even though that person was owner of all the sites.

Our navigation is pretty large since we are a global company and we have a site for all regions, countries, offices and departments plus various other sites.

There was also a problem with visitors not being able to see some newly created sites.

I spent some time on this, and I will give a short explanation of what caused both problems.

Problem 1: Only Site collection owner could see all websites in the flyout menus

A new SharePoint colleague of mine suggested the problem might be because there were too many sites in the navigation.
This did not seem logical since no matter what the limit was, I as a site collection administrator could see everything.
None the less it WAS a problem with the limit of items in the navigation.

This is fixed in the web.config file. Remember to back it up before trying.

This is an excerpt of my web.config

<siteMap defaultProvider="CurrentNavSiteMapProvider" enabled="true">
      <providers>
        <add name="SPNavigationProvider" type="Microsoft.SharePoint.Navigation.SPNavigationProvider, Microsoft.SharePoint, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" />
        <add name="SPSiteMapProvider" type="Microsoft.SharePoint.Navigation.SPSiteMapProvider, Microsoft.SharePoint, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" />
        <add name="SPContentMapProvider" type="Microsoft.SharePoint.Navigation.SPContentMapProvider, Microsoft.SharePoint, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" />
        <add name="SPXmlContentMapProvider" siteMapFile="_app_bin/layouts.sitemap" type="Microsoft.SharePoint.Navigation.SPXmlContentMapProvider, Microsoft.SharePoint, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" />
        <add name="AdministrationQuickLaunchProvider" description="QuickLaunch navigation provider for the central administration site" type="Microsoft.Office.Server.Web.AdministrationQuickLaunchProvider, Microsoft.Office.Server.UI, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" />
        <add name="SharedServicesQuickLaunchProvider" description="QuickLaunch navigation provider for shared services administration sites" type="Microsoft.Office.Server.Web.SharedServicesQuickLaunchProvider, Microsoft.Office.Server.UI, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" />
        <add name="GlobalNavSiteMapProvider" description="CMS provider for Global navigation" type="Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Navigation.PortalSiteMapProvider, Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" NavigationType="Global" EncodeOutput="true" />
        <add name="CombinedNavSiteMapProvider" description="CMS provider for Combined navigation" type="Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Navigation.PortalSiteMapProvider, Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" NavigationType="Combined" EncodeOutput="true"  />
        <add name="CurrentNavSiteMapProvider" description="CMS provider for Current navigation" type="Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Navigation.PortalSiteMapProvider, Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" NavigationType="Current" EncodeOutput="true" />
        <add name="CurrentNavSiteMapProviderNoEncode" description="CMS provider for Current navigation, no encoding of output" type="Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Navigation.PortalSiteMapProvider, Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" NavigationType="Current" EncodeOutput="false"  />
        <add name="SiteDirectoryCategoryProvider" description="Site Directory category provider" type="Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal.WebControls.SiteDirectoryCategoryProvider, Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" />
        <add name="MySiteMapProvider" description="MySite provider that returns areas and based on the current user context" type="Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal.MySiteMapProvider, Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" />
        <add name="MySiteLeftNavProvider" description="MySite Left Nav provider that returns areas and based on the current user context" type="Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal.MySiteLeftNavProvider, Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" />
        <add name="UsagePagesSiteMapProvider" description="Provider for navigation in Portal Usage pages" type="Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal.Analytics.UsagePagesSiteMapProvider, Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" />
      </providers>
    </siteMap>

What we need to do is add the DynamicChildLimit tag to 4 lines:

 <siteMap defaultProvider="CurrentNavSiteMapProvider" enabled="true">
      <providers>
        <add name="GlobalNavSiteMapProvider" DynamicChildLimit="0" />
        <add name="CombinedNavSiteMapProvider" DynamicChildLimit="0" />
        <add name="CurrentNavSiteMapProvider" DynamicChildLimit="0" />
        <add name="CurrentNavSiteMapProviderNoEncode"&nbsp;DynamicChildLimit="0" />
      </providers>
 </siteMap>

I haven’t dealt with the SharePoint navigation very much, but there definitely seems to be some sort of difference in the navigation depending if you are the site collection administrator or not.

Problem 2: Some websites are not visible in the navigation for visitors

I used trial and error with permission levels to see what exactly would make the website appear in the navigation.

It was “Edit Item” permissions. This seemed a bit odd at first, but it turned out the front pages of the new websites were unpublished, and since visitors are not allowed to edit pages or see drafts, there were no page for SharePoint to show the visitors.

After just publishing the pages there were no more navigation problems.