How to customize the homepage

Music Collection's homepage is highly customizable. It gives you all the freedom to decide what you want to show in it.

To allow this, it uses a plugin/module system native in Joomla.

When you create a link to the homepage (that is, a menu item pointing to Music Collection -> Artists / Detailed) you will see a pretty empty page, with just a letter bar and a search form.

To add content to this page, you will do it by creating modules. First of all, decide what do you want on the homepage: featured artists, featured or random albums, latest added, most popular songs... there's no limit. You have a lot of different modules served with Music Collection, and all of them can be rendered in the homepage. How to do it?

  1. Create all the modules you want to show. Make sure you enable them, and assign them to unused positions. For example, user7 or user8 (or any other position your template may offer, and you haven't used yet)
  2. Go to Music Collection administration area, and open the parameters (button on the top right corner)
  3. Among all the conifugration params, there are two text fields called INTROTEXT1 and INTROTEXT2. These are free fields that are rendered in the homepage, before and after the search bars. You can write all you want in there, including HTML code.
  4. Where you want your modules to appear, in the Introtext fields, just write this: [loadposition user7] or [loadposition user8] (NOTICE: the "[" and "]" symbols need actually to be brackets, "{" and "}")
  5. This sentence will load all the enabled modules in these positions. So, [loadposition user7] will actually be replaced by the modules existing in the position user7 (NOTICE: the "[" and "]" symbols need actually to be brackets, "{" and "}")
  6. There are no limits on the number of modules you can use, or the number of positions. So you can have as many modules rendered in your homepage!

Using this simple technique, you can achieve unique homepages, showing exactly what you want, making your site complete, nice and totally customized!

If you have questions, ask on our forum!