SharePoint Online Promoted State for Pages

Question

Working in an online teamsite and trying to get a handle on the new modern pages in the site pages library.

I noticed that New > Page, News Post, and News Link all end up as pages in the site pages library. I was trying to figure out how to tell them apart and found this thread talking about the Promoted State modern column -- you can find it from the view Add Column > Show/Hide menu, but not from the classic Library Properties. It says that regular Site Pages have a value of 0 and that News pages have a value of 2.

I've googled quite a bit, but have not found much else about the column or how it works.

First question: Does anybody know of MS documentation for this column and what values can be used? For example what is a 1 or an 8?

I also tried to change the value by first adding it to a view and then using Quick Edit to change it. However the cell remains greyed out and does not allow for changes. I'm site collection admin and have full control on this team site, so shouldn't be the issue. My guess is that when the above thread was created several months ago that it was an editable column and in an update since they locked it down, but that is just a guess?

Second question: Has anybody else tried (recently) to change the value of a Promoted State successfully? Or is there some other way you know to change it?

Answer 1

The numbers used for now are 0, 1 and 2

0 is a published 'site page' that is NOT considered 'News' and does not end up in the news roll up (ie, your home page)

1 is a news page that is not published yet

2 is a news page that is published or a news link (from the News roll up + button)

It is confusing since the news page and the site page have the same content type (Site Page)

I have never tried to change the number, however if you have just published the page (ie = 2) you can unpublish it so it will become 1. Switching from a news page (1 or 2) to 0 is more difficult.

It is true that in the very beginning you had only one type of page that used to go equally in the news roll up and in the highlighted content and it was later split to have pages that can only be rolled up in the news roll.

Answer 2

This might help too: I can't seem to be able to change the promoted state from SharePoint, but I can from SharePoint Designer. In SPD open the page and click "Edit file".

Then you can do a search (Ctrl+F) for "Promoted", or find this line and simply change the number to one of the ones mentioned by Susan above.

Hope this helps.