From the course: SharePoint Online: Working in the Modern Experience

Less flexibility in site design - SharePoint Online Tutorial

From the course: SharePoint Online: Working in the Modern Experience

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Less flexibility in site design

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- [Instructor] One of the compromises made with the modern experience is that in exchange for better templates to start from, you get less flexibility in some other places. Now, we'll dive deeper into these in other videos, but I'll give you some high-level points right now. With the classic experience, when you set up a webpage, you have a fair variety of layouts to choose from. You had even more when you were creating a publishing page, including a blank web part page that had a whole bunch of spaces reserved for parts already in place. Now, you could use these or not, and the live page content would collapse around the unused area. There aren't as many page type options in the modern experience. And also, when building a page, although you can change the layout within sections, the overall page layout is more static. And, what I personally think is one of the most jarring things, the left navigation is set on many modern pages, with no ability to change it. In the classic experience, when you selected a theme, you also selected whether you wanted Seattle style navigation, which is navigation along the left side of the page, or Oslo style, with the navigation on the top. These are still choices in the modern experience, but many modern pages override that, and put the navigation along the left whether you want it there or not. Now, I'll be repeating this a lot, there is a good chance that this is a temporary situation. Microsoft has already made numerous updates to the modern experience that have restored or augmented features, and I fully believe that this will continue. The way they've explained it to me is that they felt it was important to deliver the modern experience fast for reasons of O365 integration, stability, and adding new features. And this speed didn't always allow them time to make sure older functionality was still working right, or available at all. The thing to keep in mind is that this is all still evolving, and the race is not yet run.

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