Adding a front page to your blog

Dear Friend,

Recently, while doing a webpage for my musical idol, one of the suggestions from him was to have a front-page look instead of posts. And here is how it could be done.

1. Go to the Dashboard, and clicking on “Layout”.

2. On the sidebar, clicking on “Adding New Element”

3. Type in something in the content, then save it.

4. Drag the “widget” to the “Blog Post” area.

Now the blog would look like this:

It’ll be shown in front of the other posts, whether you are in home page or in any individual posts.

To change this widget such as it’ll show on frontpage only, you need to modify the code by adding two more lines. Go back to Dashboard->Layout, then click on Template->Edit HTML. Also click on the “Expanded Widget Templates”.

Then look for these lines:

Add these two bold lines as follow:

<b:widget id=”Text1″ locked=”false” title=”” type=”Text”>
<b:includable id=”main”>
<b:if cond=”data:blog.url == data:blog.homepageUrl”>
<!– only display title if it’s non-empty –>
<b:if cond=”data:title != “””>
</b:if></b:if></b:includable></b:widget><h2
class=”title”><data:title></data:title></h2>

<div class=”widget-content”>
<data:content>
</data:content></div>
</b:if>
<b:include name=”quickedit”>
</b:include>

</b:includable>
</b:widget>



From now on, you’ll have a different frontpage than the rest of the blog. Your blog will somewhat functioning like a normal webpage instead of a blog
The advantage of this method is that the text widget can be used effectively so add picture and other texts in “compose mode” to visually make your front page look better.

An example here:

http://hoaamduycuong.blogspot.com

(In this example, I go one step further to label the posts so you could only access the posts through their labels. I also add an “all” label to all of the posts, so the reader could view them all at once.)