Building a start or front page for my site [was: "Building a start page"]

Sorry if this subject has been already dealt, but I was not able to find anything about this in the documentation nor the forum.

I would like to build a start or home page, in which I would have the following ’special’ content:

- The intro of a proper presentation web page, and a "read more" link. It would be placed at the top of the content area, in a outstanding/highlighted place, say.
- Other intros and "read more" links to other documents or parts of the web.

So, what’s the right way to do that? With Ditto?? Any other special plugin? Just with a special template (with proper TVs) for that special page?

I think it is an easy question... Maybe I haven’t got the philosophy of MODx, yet.

Thank you in advance!! (and sorry for my English, once again)

I have found something that may be useful to me:

http://ditto.modxcms.com/tutorials/promote-to-front-page.html

As far as I understand, the standard way of selecting some content to be gathered and shown in some specific way in one given page/document, is by using Ditto capabilities/features. Am I right??

Any hint or tip will be welcomed.

Ditto is you friend to do this. You can select a parent and sort by date and get the most recent posts, or you could set a filter and use a TV (as described in the tutorial).

In any case Ditto is the correct tool to do this.

Quote from: dev_cw at Aug 27, 2008, 02:20 PM

Ditto is you friend to do this. You can select a parent and sort by date and get the most recent posts, or you could set a filter and use a TV (as described in the tutorial).

In any case Ditto is the correct tool to do this.

Dev_cw, thank you. There is still one thing that I don’t get. Maybe you can give me the clue.

Let us suppose I use Ditto with a filter + TV (the method in the tutorial). At the end, I have a Ditto call that returns several feature/important/outstanding articles/documents that I want to show in the main/home/front/start page.

But, as fas as I know, Ditto is going to apply the same "template"/style to all of them (a template that would have been previously saved as a "chunk", isn’t it?).

What if I want the first article to be different?? I mean, there will be a main article on the top of the front page with its own specific template/style, and after that, several other feature articles, with a different format/style.

How can I manage it with Ditto? Should I have two different auxiliary TV, and perform two Ditto calls (one for the "most important" article, and the other for the other feature articles) in the front page? I guess that’s the way to do it, but... I am not sure. maybe there is a special way to give a different style to the first item Ditto returns, I don’t know.

Another (too easy) question/doubt: If the "most important" article (to be shown in the top of the front page) is not expected to change during a long time... maybe it would be better not to use a TV, but simply a direct Ditto call to that document, wouldn’t it??

This is just about discovering Ditto, MODx...

THANK YOU for your help.

You can use the tplFirst parameter to style the first document of the ditto call.

If you want to make a feature out of particular articles which won’t change often as you say, it might be better to use a separate call for that.

Quote from: bob1000 at Aug 27, 2008, 05:42 PM

You can use the tplFirst parameter to style the first document of the ditto call.

If you want to make a feature out of particular articles which won’t change often as you say, it might be better to use a separate call for that.

bob1000, thank you very much for the hint.