We’ve got a customer who’s top navigation tabs aren’t being used as links to content in SharePoint. Instead, these tabs take users to other parts of their system, which is maybe fair enough given that the left navigation also gives them the same sort of access; indeed this duplication of navigation is often a source of consternation with clients.

Anyway, they’ve now added site that they do want linked from the top navigation bar. Therefore, if you click on this tab, they want it to appear highlighted – and it’s the only tab that would.

The site in question isn’t a subsite of the root site of the site collection, so I must confess, I didn’t think you could do this. They emailed and asked, though, and I suggested that the full URL that they were using (e.g. http://sharepoint/somesite/tabsite) wasn’t a good idea – as if they extend their web app for an extranet that link won’t work. As it transpired though, they’d thought to try a relative URL (e.g. /somesite/tabsite) and that worked nicely!

I had to check:

showing:

There we go, a site 2 levels down, highlighted in the top nav correctly!

I suppose it makes sense that the relative URL might work – but I’d sort of assumed that the manual links wouldn’t undergo the same checks as the ‘show subsites’ links would.