Office 365 – SharePoint – Content Search web part not displaying any data on E1 plan

Today a bit of a strange issue.

I’ve got a Content Search web part with custom display templates. I’ve split my Control and  Item display templates into separate folders. My web parts are all working fine except for on one sub site.

For the working pages using the search results web part I’m seeing the following structure appear in my browser:

All good. But when I try the same on another page it doesn’t work. The out of the box display templates are loaded but not my custom ones.

Then I switched the web part to a Search results web part and used the same display templates and all worked fine. However I did run into my previously mentioned problem again and I only got 1 sub web displayed in my web part

My query for the web part is:

contentclass:STS_Web  (Path:{\Site.URL} AND Path<>{\Site.URL})

So you would expect all my sub sites to be displayed.

Ok, so I’m running out of options here. Although I’m sure that this web part used to work just fine on a different tenant.

Then I thought  to add a search content web part manually again and I noticed that the web part didn’t exist in the web part gallery.

Ok, the content Search web part only appears when Cross Site Publishing is enabled. So I went to my site collection features and tired to enabled this feature. This gave me the following error:

Dependency feature ‘SearchDrivenContent’ (id: 592ccb4a-9304-49ab-aab1-66638198bb58) for feature ‘CrossSiteCollectionPublishing’ (id: 151d22d9-95a8-4904-a0a3-22e4db85d1e0) is not activated at this scope.

Easy, solution just enable the Search Driven Content feature.

Ai, that doesn’t seem to work. I’ve tried to enable Search Driven Content but the above message still doesn’t go away.

Then I had a quick look at the Office 365 plans. I’m running on E1 and therefore Search Driven Content isn’t available.

Pieter Veenstra

Is your business still running on paper trails, sprawling Excel files, or ageing Access databases? There's a better way — and I can show you exactly what it looks like. I'm the Technical Director of Vantage 365, a Microsoft solutions consultancy working with clients across the UK, the Netherlands, and worldwide. For over 30 years I've been turning messy, manual business processes into clean, automated systems that save time, reduce errors, and give teams the visibility they need to make better decisions. SharePains is not just any blog run by a Microsoft MVP. Have you ever used Try-Catch in Power Automate? The original post about Try-Catch in Power Automate can still be found on this site, https://sharepains.com/2018/02/07/try-catch-finally-in-power-automate-flow/ Or have you ever used the Pieter’s method to avoid variables and speed up your flows? https://sharepains.com/2020/03/11/pieters-method-for-advanced-in-flows/ You can contact me using contact@sharepains.com