Using Managed Metadata and Content Type Syndication in a Blank Site Collection
26 February, 2011
Using Managed Metadata and Content Type Syndication in a Blank Site Collection
Recently I was using testing the Managed Metadata Service to share Content Types via Content Type Hub Syndication. I created my content types in the hub and had the Managed Metadata Service all set up and my web application was subscribed to it.
So I created a new blank site collection to test the synchronisation of my content types, but no matter what I tried, they just didn’t show up. I checked all the setting on the Managed Metadata Service, ensured that the content types were published and manually ran the Content Type timer jobs, but all to no avail.
Finally, after some searching on the internet I tracked down the problem. To subscribe to the content type hub the feature TaxonomyFieldAdded needs to be enabled. This is a hidden feature so can only be enabled programmatically or via PowerShell for which the command is
Enable-SPFeature–Url “http://mysiteurl” -Identity “73EF14B1-13A9-416b-A9B5-ECECA2B0604C”
where the guid 73EF14B1-13A9-416b-A9B5-ECECA2B0604C is the id of the feature.
Once this feature is enabled you will get the Content type publishing link in Site Settings
and the published content types immediately appeared in the site collection’s Site content types.
This feature also enables the use of Managed Metadata columns in lists. Without the feature enabled you get this error when trying to use a Managed Metadata column:
which renders the column useless. As soon as the feature is enabled then you can use it as normal.
Note, that this problem only occurs in site collections which have been created as a blank site. It does not affect blank sites created within other site collections created from another template. The reason for this is that there is another feature called TaxonomyFeatureStapler which staples the feature to most other sites, with the notable exception of the blank site. I can only assume that it’s this way because the blank site template is supposed to be a base site and have minimal functionality. If you regularly create blank site collections and need to use Managed Metadata on them you should be able to create your own feature stapler to add the TaxonomyFieldAdded feature to the blank site template.