front page help

[Joel]

so i'm trying to set up a front page kinda thing on my site.

first I edited the index page to be the front page, but when I click the today's comic button, it sends me back to the front page rather than the page that should have the comic.

Then I decided that i'll make a seperate page to be the front page, went into the "comic data" under the siteadmin and set that page to be the first thing that people should see. uploaded and updated But now that page doesn't even show up as the first page, and it still shows "index.html"

i've reverted the pages back to how it was after i played around with it. You'll notice, when you click the latest comic icon, it'll lead you to the latest comic, then click previous day, then click next day or today's comic, it'll bring you back to the homepage.


any help here? i searched the wiki and the guide.

[Dr Neo Lao]

I think I know what you're talking about.

I had written up a nice tutorial in the Wiki for making this change, but it's disappeared for some reason.

Edit: actually, it's kinda still available in my original post in the forums. That will let you change the index.

I think that that's what you're after. If it's not or if you have other questions, let us know...

[Joel]

yea, in simpler terms, i want to change the index, but it's not working for me somehow...

where's your original post because the link that you gave links me to the reply section.

[Dr Neo Lao]

What on earth????

Must have copied from the wrong window - my bad. Here's the proper link.

Just in case, I just copied the text to here:

Edit: Read this bit, and read the edit further down before attempting this.

It's a little tricky. If you stuff this up and ruin your comic, I never told you this... *waves hand in a mystical manner*

1. Log in to the control panel and go to your comic.
2. Click on "Comic Data" and select the option "Show Advanced Options [Expert use only]", click 'Submit' at the bottom of the page.
3. The page will look like there's no change. Wait a moment and then click "Comic Data" again.
4. If it still looks the same, wait a moment and click it again. It should now look the same, except that the list of options will be heaps longer and the new options will have "[ADVANCED] Which blah blah blah" on the far right.
5. Find the option that says "If not index.html, what page should be shown?" on the left, "index.html" in the middle and "[ADVANCED] You can use a different file as the first page people see." on the far right.
   
   ** Important! ** From here on, it's all speculation on my part. Be careful that you are really sure before making changes or clicking "Submit".
6. Where it currently says "index.html" you punch in the new 'front page'.
7. Click on 'Submit'.

As near as I can tell, that's pretty much it.

Strongly suggested: Set up your new "front page" first. Make a new html file and call it whatever (except 'index.html'. You could call it "main.html" or "comicname.html").

Add this page to your workspace/webpages folder, run a regular update and then make damned sure that everything works hunky-dory before making the change on the control panel.

Once you're sure the page works, your links go to the index.html and everything else, go to the control panel and change index.html to whateveryouchose.html.

That ought to work. But I make no guarantees...

Edit for clarification: I just re-read the above post and noticed that it wasn't very clear.

1. Create a new page for your comic. For this example, I'm going to use "whee.html" (for no reason other than whee.html is not likely to be a name that autokeen would use. On the other hand, main.html might be; so avoid that name).
2. Set the new page up in the manner that you want your new main page to act. So put your blog / news / votebuttons / whatever on that page. Make sure you add links to your archive / the normal index.html / your forum / etc and once the page is loaded, run an update and make sure all the links etc work.
3. You site should now be operating exactly like you want it to operate, except that people still arrive at index.html instead of whee.html when they put your comc's basic url into a browser.
4. Now you go and do the bit I said above, and change the "landing page" from index.html to whee.html (I know that "landing page" isn't the proper term, but you know what I mean. If you don't, make sure that you ask first!).
5. Once you've made the change, your site should be operating in the manner that you desire.

[Joel]

okay, so i did set up the new page, named that homepage.html

i uploaded it to the /webpages folder on the ftp, then i ran an update, and checked if the links on homepage.html worked, here i haven't changed index.html to homepage.html.

so everything looks fine, i go into the comic data, change index.html to homepage.html, click submit.

now when i punch in my url, it still sends me to index.html instead of homepage.html as the first page. < there's the problem, that i had earlier
it seems that one function doesn't seem to be working correctly.

I checked how the other people in the thread created their homepage, by creating another html file to mimic index.html, but they have the problem of running into the 'Next' on the second-most recent page which leads back to the index.html

[Dr Neo Lao]

I haven't done this myself (but I may do so just to make sure that it works) but by changing the "If not index.html, what page should be shown?" to homepage.html should work as described.

I know people do it and it has been done, the only difference should be which page comes up by default.

I suppose that it may need another update after changing the advanced setting in order for it to fully work, but I'm not sure about that. Don't change it back and give it a day (or until after your next update) and see how it goes.

[Joel]

eh... nope, nothing has changed.

[Dr Neo Lao]

Odd - tell us what you did... (specifically)

(edit: also, are you using your bookmark or the raw url from fresh?)

[Joel]

ok, i'll start from the beginning.

first i got the page, homepage.html, set up and ready to go

then i uploaded that page into /workspace/webpages/

then i ran a regular update

after the update i checked if all the links one homepage.html worked

then i went to the comic data to change the "If not index.html, what page should be shown?" to homepage.html

submitted that

you suggested to run another update so i did

waited about a day to see if it worked.

and then when i type in the url, index.html still shows up as the first page.

[Dr Neo Lao]

How odd...

Okay, we've reached the limit of what I know about this. You've done everything that I said to do so the only thing that I can think of that might be affecting it would be the server hiccups that occured a few days ago.

As far as I'm aware, that should have worked, yet it did not. I'll have to look into it and see if there's anything that I'm missing.

[Vagwen]

Just thought I'd mention.... Joel's not the only one having difficulty with this. It's not working for me either. Not sure if that'll help or not, but I thought it'd be useful to know that it isn't just his computer that's doing it or something like that.

[Dr Neo Lao]

Yes, that does help.

There's pretty much only three possibilities:

- the server glitches are interfering.
- it's been disabled while the glitches are being sorted.
- I'm wrong on how it's done.

Of the three, I have a nagging suspicion that it might be the third one...