XF 2.1 Making a news home page, please help

[smodtactical]

I've tried to research this heavily but seem to be running into a wall here. I want to create a homepage that has announcement posts from a certain forum node in my main forum (like a traditional front news page except the posts are being done in the forum and going to the home page).

Page as portal homepage

With XF2 it's really simple to add a Page as the homepage and populate it with widgets to create a "portal" page. As a few people have asked how to do it I thought I'd post this quick guide. Go to admin.php?nodes/ and click Add a Node Select...

xenforo.com

I did use the above article and created the page but does this guy have a special featured posts widget? Because I am getting an error when I use his code on the page. Any more direction on how to do this? Which widget should I use? How do I specify the node I want to feature on the home page. What if I want some pictures as well from the post to show up on the front page?

My website is: www.sonicvisions.org

Also when I click my home button I get an oops error. Im thinking thats related to some inappropriate setting in my basic board info?

Thanks for the help.

 

[imno007]

There's a few different addons that allow you to manually promote certain threads, but I'm not aware of any that will automatically feature threads from a specific node.

Assuming you named your home page "home," then this should work for the index page route: pages/home/

EDIT: Oh yeah, and using the above example, your homepage URL would be yourdomain.com/pages/home/

 

[smodtactical]

Why does my website keep saying 'oops cannot find that page' when you click home? I used the same exact settings as the tutorial?

My page is called 'front' so I put http://www.sonicvisions.org/forum/pages/front/ as my homepage url.

It seems to work with sonicvisions.org/index.php but not with the url above. Also am I supposed to have a pages directory on my server because I see none.

 

[smodtactical]

Actually it simply doesn't work.

The index.php is not actually the page in question. And as I said even though I created the page there is no pages directory in my install. I think there must be some deeper problem, maybe with the install or the host?

 

[Russ]

Under the node setting, enable show in node list. Click it on the forum list and grab the URL. Then update the home page URL. It looks like you're mixing friendly urls with regular urls

 

[smodtactical]

Under the node setting, enable show in node list. Click it on the forum list and grab the URL. Then update the home page URL. It looks like you're mixing friendly urls with regular urls

When I do that the URL that I click to is http://www.sonicvisions.org/index.php

You can see my page at the bottom of the node list here: http://www.sonicvisions.org/index.php?forums/

 

[imno007]

Your page should be found here: www.sonicvisions.org/index.php?/pages/front/

There's no pages "directory" to create. That's the default route. If you enable full friendly URLs, the page should be found at www.sonicvisions.org/pages/front/ by default. I suspect the problem might be to do with your URL. Is there a reason you're redirecting to www? Try inputting www.sonicvisions.org (without the http) as the Home page URL and see what happens.

 

[smodtactical]

Ok so I changed it to just www.sonicvisions.org (for the home page URL). When I click the home button it becomes http://www.sonicvisions.org/www.sonicvisions.org and obviously results in an error. I put the http:// back and it again goes to a page.

I guess I want to know if the page its going to thats empty, is that the page I created? I tried to write some test text to see if it would show up but it didn't.

I wrote the following.

<xf:h1 hidden="true" />

<p>
    This is a test
</p>

<xf:widget key="featured_posts" />

<xf:widget key="forum_overview_members_online" position="sidebar" />

<xf:widget key="forum_overview_new_posts" position="sidebar" />

<xf:widget key="forum_overview_forum_statistics" position="sidebar" />

<xf:widget key="forum_overview_share_page" position="sidebar" />

<xf:widget key="forum_overview_new_profile_posts" position="sidebar" />

<xf:widget key="birthdays" position="sidebar" />

<xf:css>
.p-breadcrumbs {
display:none
}</xf:css>

And it didn't display this is a test and also no widgets.

 

[smodtactical]

I think I got it working partially, I deleted the featured posts part of the widget and I just got some side bar widgets working!!! YES!

But the text I wrote didn't appear. The 'this is a test' part.

I was getting errors about that featured_posts widget. I guess because I don't have it in my xenforo? I thought it was standard?

 

[Đoàn Hoàng Nam]

suggest ypu try https://xenforo.com/community/resources/xf2-8wr-xenporta-2-portal-pro.6023/

 

[imno007]

I think I got it working partially, I deleted the featured posts part of the widget and I just got some side bar widgets working!!! YES!

But the text I wrote didn't appear. The 'this is a test' part.

I was getting errors about that featured_posts widget. I guess because I don't have it in my xenforo? I thought it was standard?

I can't think of any featured posts widget that's included by default, so likely it does not exist. Whatever widgets you do have will be under Appearance/Widgets and you have to use the exact widget key name or they won't work, and none of them will display if just one isn't right. And if everything else is right, your text should appear.

 

[smodtactical]

I think I might just take Kent's suggestion and buy Xenporta 2. It looks extremely good. I wish a feature like this was part of the base product.

 

[smodtactical]

I installed xenporta 2 put I dont have the promote thread option. :\

posted on xp2 forum thread also

 

[imno007]

That's why I said above that none of them auto fetch from a node, as far as I know. But... if you happen to have Siropu Chat, you could repurpose it for something like that. You can easily remove the editor and chat options, display it in full page mode and show all threads from nodes of your choosing. You can control the excerpt length and each thread is linked, but whether or not you could get it formatted exactly as you'd like, I don't know. Haven't experimented with it much in that way.

 

[smodtactical]

That's why I said above that none of them auto fetch from a node, as far as I know. But... if you happen to have Siropu Chat, you could repurpose it for something like that. You can easily remove the editor and chat options, display it in full page mode and show all threads from nodes of your choosing. You can control the excerpt length and each thread is linked, but whether or not you could get it formatted exactly as you'd like, I don't know. Haven't experimented with it much in that way.

I think xp2 does have an autopromote feature. I can see it but I haven't tried it yet.

But even manual promotion is ok for me for now.

 

[imno007]

I think xp2 does have an autopromote feature. I can see it but I haven't tried it yet.

But even manual promotion is ok for me for now.

I'm not positive, but I was reasonably sure that I had read a post in the addon's discussion thread from a user who thought that a certain option did that and was told that no, that's not the way it worked. But you're in a better position to verify that than me, since I don't have the addon.

 

[smodtactical]

I'm not positive, but I was reasonably sure that I had read a post in the addon's discussion thread from a user who thought that a certain option did that and was told that no, that's not the way it worked. But you're in a better position to verify that than me, since I don't have the addon.

Ok fair enough I'll experiment and report back.

 

[smodtactical]

Finally got the promotions working. My first article is up.

 

[imno007]

Looks good. So were you able to auto pull it from a node or did you have to manually add it?

 

[smodtactical]

That one I manually added, didn't try auto yet.

Could you try to register if you don't mind. Lately users having problems registering.