Multiple Home pages

Executive Summary (fancy speak for "summary")

Different menus had entries for "Home" but the page you got differed depending upon which one you clicked. I have solved the problem for now but still suspect there is a deeper issue to be solved.

The Story

I have a "main menu" and a "top menu". I also have a "breadcrumbs" which I did not realise until Guru Simon pointed it out to me. Yes, I'd heard the phrase (seen it in the "modules" menu in Joomla!, to be precise) and I knew about that string of links crossing the page under the header that showed you where you'd got to, but never connected the two.

So I have three places you can click to get to "Home". The problem was this: When you go directly to http://teamcoachingnetwork.com, you got the header, the articles, the menus, but also the "login" box, the info about who else is on the site (c'mon, everyone!) and the poll about what you think about training courses. On the other hand, when you clicked on Home in the top menu after going somewhere else, you don't get those extra items.

At first I thought there might be some other way to connect the menu items directly to the front page; maybe there is, and I'll try that later. What I did discover is that the appearance or not of modules, such as logins, polls, news stories, etc., can be selectively controlled from within the modules menu. My Menu items for Home can be ticked to appear in both version of the "home" page.

I went to Extensions|Module Manager|Polls(for instance) and at lower left I get "Menu Assignment". Using CTRL-leftclick I can select both the Home in my Mainmenu and Home in my Topmenu and voila - the poll appears in both home pages. I then repeated for the other items (Login and Who's Online).

Next thing to try is making the non-default pages simply links to the base domain http://teamcoachingnetwork.com and the upcoming news is about how my friend Jo managed to handle the tricky upgrade from 1 to 1.5 while preventing evildoers using her server to broadcast malicious spam.

'Til next time,

Dave

My site is here.
Joomla! is based here.