“Design Manager Bug” when adding an app

Question

In 2013 if you create a custom master page and upload it with Design Manager and it does not contain the left nav menu placeholder (see the blog article here) the "Add an app" function breaks. According to that article (from nearly a year ago) Microsoft was working on a fix. Does anyone know if it's been released yet? I can't find definitive information on it beyond that article and a bunch of people on other sites referencing it. I tried looking through the CU descriptions, but I'm not sure exactly how MS would phrase such an issue.

If there is no patch for it, does anyone know a work-around other than the one in the article? I would like to be able to use completely custom navigation if possible.

Answer 1

Found a good enough work-around here, read Lucas' comment at the bottom for the best fix.

Full explanation: You can simply include the quicklaunch but then add a CSS entry to hide it and, if necessary, shift the content section over to take its place. By default, the content is styled to have a left margin big enough to keep it from overlapping the quicklaunch, so if you only hide it you will still have the blank space where it used to be until you set the content left margin to be 0. See the code below:

#sideNavBox { display: none; } /* This hides the quicklaunch. */
.ms-core-navigation { display: none; } /* This hides ALL navigation, including the top nav. */
#contentBox { margin-left: 0px; } /* If necessary, this shifts the page content to fill the space where the quicklaunch used to be. In my scenario it is not necessary because I am replacing the quicklaunch with my own menu. */

Cheers!