Splash Page

Why would you want to annoy your visitors with that? (just curious)

website I am making for a friend wants it….

If you look in the Reading Options in the dashboard you’ll see a section for changing the Front page.

You can make your home page static, simply create a page that will take the place of the blog as home page.

I have done this with a restaurant blog i created. Essentially the home page is static, and to access the blog, one has to click the blog page.

What i would like to eventually do is to get rid of the sidebars on the homepage, so it looks less like a blog. This i haven’t figured out yet.

To hide the sidebar on any page, you can use conditional statements, but you need to know what the id is for the Page (I’m assuming you are using the Page function for wordpress “static” content). In any case, the idea is the same for category pages… I’ll assume Page and say that the page you use for “home” has an id of ‘3’

basically:

<?php
if (is_page(3)) {}
else {
get_sidebar(); }
?>

the logic says: if this is the page with the id of ‘3’, don’t do anything. But in all other cases, show the sidebar.

Simple. Because you are inside a php statement, you don’t use the

<?php get_sidebar(); ?>

edited: oops, forgot to say that this would be put into your page.php file if you are doing this using Pages… if you are doing this kind of thing for various category pages, you’d use (is_category('3')) { etc and you’d put it into your index.php file. I am assuming you are not using custom category template files because if you are, then you can simply remove the <?php get_sidebar();?> from the custom category page you use for your home page.

to learn more, search the documentation for “conditional” and “category templates” and “(is_page());”

HTH

Not sure if you still are looking for info, but I ended up using jquery to create a splash page – how you go about it really depends on whether you want the splash to appear with every return to “home” or the front_page() or not.

If yes, you can create divs that are display:none to start with, then use the fairly simple jquery functions to show/hide or fadeIn/fadeOut content in them.

If not, create a new static page with your splash, set it to be the “home” or front_page() using settings.

An example can be seen at fixeselfcenter.com

This uses a static WordPress Page set to be “home” in the settings and then the link “Home” goes to what had been the front_page in the past by referencing its permalink.

That link “Home” uses conditional logic if (is_page(3)) {} else {echo //code to write the link} to either write the link or not based on whether you are on the perceived home page (page 3) or not.

Previously, it had used the (if (is_front_page()) conditional to show that link (since it WAS the front page in the past).

WordPress is cool – a truly easy to use CMS besides the basic blogging stuff.