Time for action—adding items to the home page

Let's add some stuff to the home page through the Article Manager.

  1. Navigate to Content | Article Manager.
  2. In the Front Page column, click on the red cross of four articles: Deplorable Still Lifes, Ugly Art Lecture, The Art of Bob Ross, and This Years Meeting. The red cross turns into a green check mark. The results are shown in the following screenshot. Four articles are set to show on the Front Page:
  3. Click on Preview. You've got a home page filled with content! Four articles are displayed on the home page as intro texts with Read more links:

What just happened?

By clicking on the icon in the Front Page column in the Article Manager you have added four articles to the home page. On the frontend, these four articles are now shown in the default Joomla! Front Page layout; the first intro text is displayed in the full mainbody width, the intro texts below that are presented in two columns. We'll leave this for now—but rest assured, you'll learn how to tweak these display options to your heart's content in the later chapters.

Tip

Remove the "Welcome to the Front Page" heading

By default, a Joomla! home page shows the headline "Welcome to the Front Page". We don't want to keep that message. To remove it, we'll have to tweak the settings of the Home link in the Main Menu:

  1. Navigate to Menus | Main Menu.
  2. Click on Home.
  3. In the Parameters (System) section, delete the text in the Page Title box.
  4. Click on Save. The Page Title has now been removed.

It's not enough to just leave the welcome message and change Show Page Title to No. In that case, the page title would effectively disappear from your home page. However, it would still show in the browser Title Bar.

The Front Page is not the home page (or is it?)

Are you in for a little confusion on Joomla! jargon? You'll notice Joomla! uses the word Front Page instead of home page. Technically, these two are not the same:

  • The home page is the full page the user sees when clicking on Home in the Main Menu; it's the top level page of your site.
  • In Joomla!, the Front Page is the main content area (the mainbody) within the home page. The home page can feature other items—modules—around the mainbody.

In other words, there is more to the home page than just the Front Page in the form of modules. As modules aren't part of the Front Page, you cannot control them through the Front Page settings. You'll use the settings of the modules themselves to control whether they appear on the home page. We'll see an example of that when we add a Poll module later in this chapter.

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