Splash Page (Noob Query)

sonicanimation
(@sonicanimation)

21 years ago

Howdy,

Ok … I have a quick newbie question here, so please excuse ignorance. I’m in the process of upgrading to WP 1.5 from Blogger. Have imported all the content over (including comments … yay !!!), in the process of fine-tuning before going live, messing around with templates etc etc. One thing I’ve been wanting to do is have a Splash Page before the blog loads. I know, I know … I can hear the internal groans already 🙂

But lets assume for a minute I’ve decided I’m having this splash page regardless of how ‘gay’ that whole concept is. I looked at a few different ways of doing this – having WP and the blog in different directories, using the ‘static page’ plugin etc. Eventually though I decided I’d go a slightly different route, so what I’ve done is modify all the source code throughout the various WP files in my installation to call index2.php instead of the default index.php. Ditto templates etc. So far so good – I now have my gay-arse splash page set up as index.html, and this of course has a link to index2.php which fires up the blog.

Everything works – the blog works, archives work, rss, comments, admin console – the whole shebang. My question essentially is whether having done this would mess with update pinging for the various tracking services, including (especially) any WordPress-specific update trackers. In other words – do these tracking services generally expect ‘updates’ to occur in index.php on WordPress installations, or is it possible to specify other locations (index2.php in my case) as the location to check for updates ?

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

mahalie
(@mahalie)

21 years ago

What you’ve done is way harder and potentially messier than just using .htaccess. You should be able (if you’re on an Apache server with requisite permission) set your index page in your .htaccess file to any page you want. Index.html, splash.html…whatever.

Add this to your .htaccess file:
DirectoryIndex filename.ext

Anyway, that’s how I would do it. Here’s a good basic tutorial on .htaccess files if you need it: http://customersupport.websiteproviders.net/tutorials/htaccess/

ifelse
(@ifelse)

21 years ago

Well done, you’ve managed to do things the hard way:-)

To make a splash page in WP1.5, all you had to do was create a file called home.php in your theme directory with the contents of the index.html that you’re currently using. This would have been the cleaner and easier solution to your problem.

Back to your original question though. The fact that your index page is called something other than index.php should have no effect on update pings.

moshu
(@moshu)

21 years ago

Did you see this? Though, I assume it’s too late…

Thread Starter sonicanimation
(@sonicanimation)

21 years ago

Duuuuuh ! Told you it was a noob question 🙂 Thanks a lot guys – yes, .htaccess is an easier way, home.php is even easier !

D’oh …. now I gotta move files back again 🙂

music_man
(@music_man)

21 years ago

Hi

When I make home.php – which is an introduction to the site I had an “enter” link, which linked it to the index.php file. I did not intend home.php to be used again after they enter index.php as I only want it called when the user types in the domain name.

However when I click the link to “index.php” it shows the “home.php” file. The index.php file is different to the home.php file.

Is there any way to change it so I have a home.php file which can be serparate to the index.php file?

Thanks