[support] Question regarding building a start page

[Henning Sprang]

On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 9:19 AM, John Fletcher <net at twoedged.org> wrote:
> Find the file page.tpl.php in the directory of the theme you are using.
> Create a copy of this file called page-front.tpl.php. Then add a few
> paragraphs of text to this new file, and see what happens!

Hmm, I'd always try to modify themes as less as possible, and
especially keep any content away from them. Be it only for the reason
that the contents edit otherwise can be changed much easier.
More important, this will not persist when the theme is changed, and
there's not internationalization possible when putting contents
directly into the template.

I might have gotten the question wrong, so my hint is missing some
bits, but still, there are ways to do these things without touching
templates.

The standard thing in drupal to get some type of welcome message seems
to me to set the "mission" field on the site information dialog. You
only have to take care that the theme you use is handling it
correctly.

If the theme is not supporting this, or a simple textual sentence is
not enough for you, you can create a new page and define is as the
frontpage (as I explained above), enter your html as you like, and if
you want to get the same summary as it is on the default start page,
you can add this php code:

<?php
   print node_page_default();
?>

You must set input type to "php", for sure ;)

Henning