Just a heads up that if you have an older Office 365 tenant that started its default site collection in classic and has since been converted into a modern – it breaks the Site Pages content type.

This means that when you’ve added metadata to classify the pages, whilst you can tag the pages on creation and in the Site Pages library like this :

When you want to use that column in the News Part on any page in the site collection to display certain news to certain people – it won’t pick up the columns you’ve created under the Page Properties list.

What you should see :

The problem lies with the Site Page Content Type. New columns no longer go to it when the site has been converted.

The content type has been sealed so you can’t edit it either.

We had a call open with Microsoft for 3 weeks on this issue – there doesn’t seem to be a way to resolve it without opening the content type with PowerShell. A risk we are not willing to take as Microsoft cannot tell us what implications it will have, nor will they support the site if we do that – even though it was their last suggestion to fix it.

This means that using the default site collection for your company news isn’t going to work because you can’t split out different news types on the front-end.

The only way around this is to create a separate organisational news site collection and do it all in there.

This appears to only be an issue on sites that have been converted from classic to modern – all other modern site collections work as expected in this scenario.