Is it possible to have a homepage that differs heavily from all other pages?

I am speaking primarily of making a homepage that can be made different from all other pages on the site.

The most simple example I could find is the way ArsTechnica http://arstechnica.com/ is laid out.

On the ArsTechnica site, the main page has the featured articles, and the sidebar that compresses the content area to a smaller size. Then on all the other pages on the site the content area expands and the sidebar disappears.

I’m trying to find out if this is possible. I assume that this means I’d need to use a seperate template file for the homepage and then have the rest of the site use the default file.

Is this possible? If not, is their a CMS out there that can accomplish this easily?

Thanks

Ah, I believe I have found it with the "Use Template" function under each section.

I suppose I"ll just customize a template specifically for the homepage and then select that for the homepage.

I believe I might have a few more questions on how to pull data from other sections of the site, but I’ll read up on doing that before posting.

Modx is pretty sweet

You got it. You can have as many templates as you need. The key is to use chuncks for the common elements, this will make it easier to perform modifications.

You can also set up template variable and have a dynamic structure that will build the page according to the TVs. To do this you need to either use some sort of conditional statement (see tvConditional snippet) or use PHx (look for it in the repositoty as well).

TVs are nice if there’s just going to be a few relatively small items specific to the home page, but if it’s really going to be totally different in layout as well as content, a separate template would be much less complex and resource-heavy.