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Section Navigation in Gutenberg

The Section Navigation provides a secondary navigation that appears to the right of content at the top of a series of pages. It includes a single parent page, and multiple children pages that are assigned to that parent under a section titled “In This Section.”

Adding a New Section Navigation

In Gutenberg, three conditions must be met in order to add a Section Navigation to your pages:

  1. You must have your parent page included in your site level navigation, and all children pages assigned under it (Appearance > Menus). Note: section navigation is not functional for parent pages added to the menu as Custom Links.

2.   You must have all children pages pointing to the parent (Edit Page > Parent). Parent is located in the right sidebar of the Block Editor.

3.    You must add a Section Navigation block to the top of your page (Edit Page > New Block > Section Navigation)

Adding an Existing Section Navigation

If your site previously had working Section Navigation in the old Classic Editor, but you are not seeing it in your Gutenberg-migrated site, you can easily re-install Section Navigation. The Panels to Blocks migrator should take care of migrating your Section Navigation automatically, so the easiest way to migrate is to either migrate each page individually, or request to be bulk migrated ahead of schedule.

If you have migrated your panels to blocks and section navigation is still not displaying, please try the following steps:

  1. Edit the page that has Section Navigation.
  2. Add the Section Navigation Block to the page by clicking on Block Inserter in the top toolbar. Then open Document Overview in the top toolbar and move the section navigation block to the top of the list.
  3. Take the content that you want to display inline with the Section Navigation and drag it under the Section Navigation block in Document Overview so that it nests under it in the list.
  4. Save the page.

Here is a screencast of this manual recovery process being performed on a page that was converted to Gutenberg and needs to have the Section Navigation re-added.