Hi Alex,

As far as I can see, there's no way to change which articles are picked up by the "frontpage" view of the com_content component. There's certainly no official way to do it, and I am pretty sure that the frontpage view just queries the database directly for the most recent articles that have been tagged as "frontpage". This makes the behaviour very hard to override.

Stepping back for a moment, what are you trying to achieve? Are you basically just wanting to be able to hand-pick a set of articles for different situations? Will these selections of articles change very much/often?

I wonder if you could try one of these approaches:

1 - for each of the different scenarios, create a content category. Create a category "blog" menu item in the main menu to show the articles from that category. Shuffle or add items to this category to shuffle the items on that page. Use MetaTemplate to change the "default" menu item to this one, and deactivate all the other category blog menus, depending on whatever criteria you are using for the different groups of customers.

In this way, the front page always looks like a front page (the category blog view is practically identical to the frontpage view), and you get full and easy control over which articles appear in each view, just by changing which articles are in which category.

2 - alternatively, you may be able to use a module like "Mini Frontpage":
http://www.templateplazza.com/view-deta … a-1.5.html
http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions … -news/2751

This is a module that you would add to your normal front page. You normal front page might just be a very short article, but with the addition of this module above or below the article you would get a frontpage-like display. As far as I can see, this module would allow you to specify a category that the articles should come from.

Therefore you could set up several "Mini Frontpage" modules, one for each scenario. Each may point to a different category, rather like I suggested above.

Then you could use MetaMod to switch which module got loaded on the front page, depending on those scenarios you were talking about.


What neither of these options allow you to do easily is to share the same article between 2 different versions of the front page - because they rely on using a different category per version of the front page. But I suppose you could duplicate any articles you needed to share between 2 different categories.


Anyway, those are just off the top of my head, so I hope they help!

Cheers,
Stephen

I just gave a second thought to it, and I will do everything in order not to duplicate any articles and preserve quality SEO. I will work my way around. It's alot of work but I rather do it this way.

OK I follow you on that last suggestion. It is more laborious but it would definitely be a good alternative for duplicated articles.

I got another one... I thought of something; what about just not using any frontpage article at all? I mean, just designing the frontpage only with modules using metamodpro, would it be bad for SEO quality to do that? Do module contains meta information that are as good as articles meta information for search engines?

I happen to think maybe it could be better. How about you?

Cheers,
Alex

If you could just answer this post too as I am gonna experiment with the mini-frontpage in the meanwhile. Thanks

atherrien wrote:

I got another one... I thought of something; what about just not using any frontpage article at all? I mean, just designing the frontpage only with modules using metamodpro, would it be bad for SEO quality to do that? Do module contains meta information that are as good as articles meta information for search engines?

Dynamic redirection:

Let's say you want to pick up certain articles, and redirect to certain other articles.

1 - in MetaTemplate Pro, enter the id numbers of the articles that you want to detect into the article ID box. Thus when any one of these is detected, the rule will succeed.

2 - in the SUCCEED action, do the following:

// change this to the menu item id (Itemid) of the menu item
// that the target (destination) article should appear in:
$target_Itemid = 999; // <-- change here!
// You are going to redirect anyone requesting article 100 to article 200 instead, etc.
// Customise as appropriate:
$redirections = array(
100 => 200,
101 => 201,
102 => 202
);
if (array_key_exists($id, $redirections) ) {
  $app = &JFactory::getApplication();
  $app->redirect( str_replace( '&amp;', '&', JRoute::_(  "index.php?Itemid=$target_Itemid&option=com_content&view=article&id=" . $redirections[ $id] ) ) );
}

I just tested this and it worked for me...
Hope it does for you too.
Cheers,
Stephen