Let say that you want to have or create a splash screen page on your Joomla, Mambo, Drupal, WordPress where users can choose what what language their prefer, or you just want to put an a huge image to greet your visitors. And suddently you’re wondering “How on earth I’m supposed to do that kind of thing?”.
Well, don’t be sad now because it’s not difficult to that. All you need is to place an extra command in your .htaccess. Just add this line of code anywhere in your .htaccess file.
DirectoryIndex index.html index.php
This code will tell Apache that when somebody enter your site e.g www.yourdomain.com then Apache will display index.html as the default home page.
Note: You can replace the index.html name according to your splash screen file name.
This works great and all but in Joomla the first Main Menu Nav button pointed to the “frontpage” component now links to the splash page. Any ideas?
January 22, 2008 / 1:39 am
Thats simple, just unpublished the default Home menu, and create a new “Link – Url ” menu named Home, and point that menu to your splash page.
January 22, 2008 / 8:30 am
I unpublished the “Home” link and created a new one pointing to the home page url http://www.mydomain.com/index.php and it still goes to http://www.mydomain.com which is where my splash page is since it is http://www.mydomain.com/index.html.
January 23, 2008 / 5:48 am
You got it all wrong bro
If you create a new menu that points to index.php that is useless, because index.php is Joomla’s main index file. If you want the Home menu to go to your splash screen page, you should point the Home menu to index.html and not index.php
Hope this helps..
January 23, 2008 / 6:26 am
Thanks for your help.
The thing is I don’t want the Home button to take me to the Splash page. The server is setup to see index.html first. That is my splash page. I have a link on that page to index.php. I also did the .htaccess trick you describe. Pretty straight forward.
The home button by default is setup to take me to the “LiveSite URL” which is http://www.mydomain.com. Which is my splash page index.html. I want the home button to take me to the Joomla main page at index.php. When I create a new button and URL it to index.php it takes me to http://www.mydomain.com anyway.
Thanks.
January 24, 2008 / 2:04 am
Hello Drew,
Are you sure that the button menu navigation load the menu from the database or it was manually defined from the template?
To make sure, check the template you’re using and see whether menu was manually defined in the template or not.
January 24, 2008 / 6:59 am
I have the same problem here, I’d amended the .htaccess (fine).
The path I want is that the user only hits the splash page once upon entry so once in joomla when the user clicks on ‘home’ the return to ww.domain.com/index.php and not http://www.domain.com (splash page).
Any ideas, swift responses would be greatly appreciated as I’m working for a client!
February 20, 2008 / 10:21 pm
poor client.
February 22, 2008 / 9:39 pm
Geektips have you actually tried this with Joomla, Mambo, Drupal and WordPress? Changing your index page with the .htaccess file has the potential of breaking a lot of the links in the CMS. I don’t know about Joomla, Mambo, or Drupal, but I know that in WordPress it references the index.php to show elements like comments, archives, pages and categories and the way that it references the index is just to point back to the main url it was installed on. So if you set it up on mydomain.com it will point to mydomain.com?p=1#respond and if your default index is an html file, WordPress just attempted to run php variables in html.
February 23, 2008 / 2:52 am
For what the hell is that?
April 10, 2008 / 9:16 pm
Same problem, any fixes yet?
June 6, 2008 / 2:25 pm
Have you finally found a solution ?
I m still searching !!!
November 5, 2008 / 12:20 am
Anybody any ideas on how to create a splash screen page and make it work. It shouldn’t appear of course in navigation and visitors shouldn’t be able to go back to this splash screen page, just a way to enter site Thanks for help
closets
November 5, 2008 / 10:57 pm
Hi all You can use two different templates. on e for splash page and another one for your website.
I used splash page with login.
Its working fine.
Steps to be follow
– Go to template manager
– in that u can open any template (Not default one)
– then u can assign the template for menu items.
See the attachements…
U can use more than 1 templates for your site.
[b]Cheers,
Regards,
Sathish[/b] :laugh:
April 4, 2009 / 11:16 am
Hi,
Here is the solution for it:
Your splash page index.html should be on the same root where your index.php have now open index.php page and add this line of code in the top of index.php just after <?php
//////////////////Code Help From Outdoorbranding.com//////////////////////////////
if(isset($_SERVER["HTTP_REFERER"]) && $_SERVER["HTTP_REFERER"]!=”"){ } else { header(“Location:index.html”); }
//////////////////Code Help From Outdoorbranding.com//////////////////////////////
Thats it
Try it and it is working fine
If you have some other questions or query do let me know i will provide the solution
Muhammed Ameen
muhammed.ameen@gmail.com
Outdoorbranding.com
April 27, 2009 / 1:13 pm
Wow….after searching for hours on google, this post gave me the answer and solved this issue. Thank you so much
June 17, 2009 / 12:00 pm
does this work with wordpress?
August 18, 2009 / 11:38 am
Hi Muhammed
I use your trick but it didn’t work.
Any suggestion
August 30, 2009 / 7:45 pm
Hi you nice people!
Muhammed, thanks for your tutorial on how to make a splash screen. Can you please tell me what the index.html should link to in order to go to the main page of Joomla (index.php doesnt work)
Cheers folks,
Jonas
December 9, 2009 / 7:28 am
JOOMLA SOLUTION
based on Muhammeds info –
1)
I changed his code to (single quotes):
if(isset($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']) && $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']!=''){ } else { header('Location:index.html'); }put it in the Joomla root index.php file at the top
2)
create an index.html file
I used the link in this file like:
just a normal plain link to your site - the previous php will know that you are in the same root and send you to homepage not the splashscreenSave the index.html in your root of Joomla
Test:
- In browser address bar type your domain
- Your splashscreen comes up and you click your link.
- You arrive at your site in the Joomla template
- Click the “home” menupoint – and you should NOT see your splashscreen.
- Type your url again in the browser – and here is your splash again…
Seems to work for me…
May 11, 2010 / 11:29 pm
Pls help me with other splash screen solution
July 21, 2010 / 9:35 pm
Hi,
for WordPress, I also wanted to have a splash page, but combined with a static homepage behind it.. And it all had to be within the WP dabase, to make sure it was SEO proof. I managed to solve it, you can read how here:
Hope this helps some of you resolve related issues!
September 6, 2010 / 5:01 pm
Mmm, for some reason the link doesn’t show up in my comment (#22). Here it is in plain text:
http://www.ispace.nu/rainbow/archives/175
September 6, 2010 / 5:01 pm
This didn’t work for me.
I added the above code and now no matter which link on the splash page I click it always loops me back to domain.com/index.html. Even if I manually type in domain.com/index.php it brings me right back to the splash screen.
I don’t think this is possible actually unless you hack the core Joomla code.
November 23, 2010 / 1:35 pm
for WordPress: make new page WITH NO TITLE.
go to settings > reading
set front page to static. select BLANK from the pulldown (which represents the new page with no title).
from here you can style the new, untilted page with a different or modified template, or simply leave as-is. (i simply left my page styled like the others but added a slideshow in the content.)
wordpress will not display the untitled page title in the main menu, and no links will be active until you click them.
make sense?
November 29, 2010 / 2:49 pm
This worked somewhat (H&W’s hack on Muhammed’s code).
I got the splash page when I typed in my URL.
BUT when I click on the link from my splash page to go to mydomain.com/index.php, I get the splash screen again and I’m stuck in an endless loop.
Hellp!
September 12, 2011 / 9:40 pm
Like what Gigi said – this worked somewhat.
For me, all my direct links now lead to a “404 page cannot be found” error. Has anyone figured out a work around that problem?
December 13, 2011 / 2:07 am