By jimmyho on

Hi all.

Can anyone please tell me how to create a static page as my splash/home page, which I can also use as top-level navigation (static links) ??

I have seen resources from Views and other modules, but I'd presume there is a simple way to do this?

Thanks guys! :)

Jimmy

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

mityok’s picture

mityok commented

May be you can put a static index.html file in your site root directory and create your static splash/home page in it.
That static file will not be processed by Drupal.

--
My blog (in russian) www.veldv.info

jimmyho’s picture

jimmyho commented

Mityok: Good point. That's one possible solution...but...what if want to show the header and footer, but not any of the columns?

eg, splash page:
http://www.my-wardrobe.com/

Then the blog page
http://blog.my-wardrobe.com/

This site is ran but wordpress I believe.

Anyone?
Thanks again.

silverwing’s picture

silverwing commented

you can always create a page-front.tpl.php file for the front page.

~silverwing

_____________________________________________
Land of Midnight | MisguidedThoughts | showcaseCMS

WorldFallz’s picture

WorldFallz commented

You could type the code/html you want into a block and just place the block (admin/build/block/add) where you want it (always test block code in a regular node page first, or you may make your site inaccessible due to bad code while developing the block).

===
"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day.
Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." -- Lao Tzu
"God helps those who help themselves." -- Benjamin Franklin
"Search is your best friend." -- Worldfallz

jimmyho’s picture

jimmyho commented

There are left and right sidebar, content, footer...

If I put the block into the content, then the columns will be showing.

am I using the wrong theme?

I should get a theme that has header-content-footer, where columns are IN-side content ??

Would that work?

(am new to Drupal as you can see, very competent in CSS/HTML thought,just need to know where to look and avoid to reinvent the wheel)

WorldFallz’s picture

WorldFallz commented

no worries-- we were all new once....

You could change to a theme that has regions more like what you desire or just add add regions to your current theme. For a video on this topic see http://drupal.org/node/147066.

===
"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day.
Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." -- Lao Tzu
"God helps those who help themselves." -- Benjamin Franklin
"Search is your best friend." -- Worldfallz

jimmyho’s picture

jimmyho commented

Thanks again for the help.

So..basically,

I would...
Create a new block, say, 'splash_200801', write the HTML, and add to a region. For the 'Pages' field, I enter something like splash, (and create a dummy page, splash) so that when someone visit http://mygloriousblog.com/splash, this block would override the usual layout?

If I want to change it every month or something...

I will remove that block from the region and create another one 200802 and add to region, with the the same 'Pages'

Is that the way to do it?

Thanks

WorldFallz’s picture

WorldFallz commented

hmm... I think i misunderstood what you were looking for. Now that i've looked more closely at the my-wardrobe links you provide above, I think what you really want is just a custom front page. If you're using a phptemplate based theme, you can create an entire custom front page by copying your theme's page.tpl.php and renaming it page-front.tpl.php. you can then theme that page any way you like with html, css, and php, flash, whatever. There's also the http://drupal.org/project/front module that adds some nice features to a custom front page.

I've seen some php snippets that check the date and pick graphics based on season-- there's no reason you shouldn't be able to do it based on day of week, month, holiday, randomly, etc. If you can code it with PHP it can be part of your theme.

You could even embed a view in a node (with the viewfield module), set that node to be your front page, and have the view set to display random nodes from the query-- without writing any code.

===
"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day.
Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." -- Lao Tzu
"God helps those who help themselves." -- Benjamin Franklin
"Search is your best friend." -- Worldfallz

jimmyho’s picture

jimmyho commented

Thanks mate!

I think I sort of got the idea now.

Found the below, which sounds like what I'd need if I want to have more flexibility in choosing which template files to use with more complex logic.

http://www.lullabot.com/articles/hacking_phptemplate

http://si-lumen.us/api/function/_phptemplate_variables/lumen

WorldFallz’s picture

WorldFallz commented

Yep... that's definitely the idea but those articles are a bit old-- a great many template files have been added to d6. For a couple of great videos describing the new template features of d6 see:

===
"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day.
Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." -- Lao Tzu
"God helps those who help themselves." -- Benjamin Franklin
"Search is your best friend." -- Worldfallz