SimplePortal
Social => General Discussion => Topic started by: srinib on September 17, 2012, 02:38:10 PM
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I have a community website run on SMF 2.0.2. I need a simple and decent looking Homepage for my website. And i happen to stumble upon Simple Portal. I liked SMF's home page. It looks very functional. I am looking for something similar to that. And I am not technical. Will i be able to generate such a home page using Simple Portal? Can someone from Simple Portal team help me to get a Home Page similar to that?
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The page at simplemachines.org was not made with Simple Portal, but with some custom code.
However, it would certainly be possible to generate something like it using Simple Portal, if you have your SMF forum set up to make use of it.
1) For the navigation bar/buttons at the top of the screen, Simple Portal does not offer a solution. You may want to make some changes to your theme
2) If you do not wish to make additional changes to your theme, you could use a Simple Portal BBC or HTML block to include a graphic such as is used for the "Simple Machines Forum: Elegant, effective, powerful, free. It's that simple"
3) You can use an HTML block to do what is done with the 3 blocks with buttons (High Quality Support, for example). There are other ways to achieve this.
4) You can use top and right blocks to achieve what you see in the left and right panes of that page.
In particular, you can use a boardnews block to show the sorts of things you see in "Latest news". You may desire some changes to the "boardnews template" used in Simple Portal, if you want exactly the same format you see on the Simple Machines page.
In summary -- Simple Portal can get you started creating something similar to the SimpleMachines.org website. For some of it, you will need to use some customization.
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AngelinaBelle,
Thanks a lot. You have given a very detailed explanation. With this, I feel i can start with the SomplePortal and get the desired look to my home page.
Just one more thing i wanted to clarify before i get started. I am a bit confused about the term Block, which has been extensively used in this SimplePortal forum. Are they something similar to Frames? Because, i happen to go through a SEO manual which says, more frames in a homepage(or any of the pages in the website) is bad as far as SEO is concerned.
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Have a look at the HTML for this site. You will see that frames are not used.
When you look at any of the pages on this forum, or especially the "home" or portal page, you will see several "blocks", such as the Recent Posts block, the staff block, the User Info block.
You can see this in the HTML, as well -- you can see things like
<div class="sp_block_section" id="sp_block_2">This shows you where the block with the block_id of 2 shows up.
If you install SMF + Simple Portal on a test website and start playing, you will understand much better about the blocks concept.
You might also like to have a look at the Simple Portal documentation. You can read a bit about the basics of blocks there.
Enjoy!
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Sure. I shall go through the documentation part this weekend. Thank you.