Custom Home Page

I am fairly new to nopCommerce and I am trying to create a custom home page for this theme.

My goal is to create a slideshow that is full width (980px) and then under that utilize the two column layout with a left sidebar and a right content section.  I have added a slider to the before_content widget and that does achieve this, but it displays within the header div's and not within the body of the content.  Any help would be great.

Hi jkeeler,

The home page in the Lighthouse theme is one column. So if you want to have a two columns then you need to change the layout of the home page. Please note that the two column layout has the content on the left side and the sidebar is on the right side by design in the theme. So you can either just set the two column layout to the home page or create a new one.
If you want to have a slider on the home page only (not in any other pages) and this slider to be above the content and the side bar you can use sections as we do in the Electronics theme.
Please refer to this post for more information.

Hope this helps!

Ok I took the _ColumnTwo.cshtml file and duplicated it to be _ColumnsTwoHome.cshtml and then used it in my index.html layout call function.  To get the slider on the home page, I created it and assigned it to widget home_page_top and then added:

`<div class="hmslider">
  @Html.Widget("home_page_top")
</div>`

before the center-2 div tags. Worked perfectly.  

Now I need to add the blog to the home page within some custom div tags within the center-2 div's How can I display the latest blog post on the home page? Thanks in advance.

Hi JKEELER,

I am glad that you managed to make the modification successfully!

Unfortunately in nopCommerce there is no functionality to display blog posts on the home page. You can show news instead. There is a setting in the Administration -> Configuration -> Settings -> News Settings that is called "Show on home page" and if checked news will be shown on the home page.

Hope that helps!

It seems that the anywhere slider is not working properly on multisite install I have.  I specify to show 2 sliders - 1 on each store - and the same one shows up on both sites.  Do you know if there are issues with that plugin while using it on a multisite install?

Hi jkeeler,

Just tested and it turned out to be a caching issue. It will be fixed tommorow.

Thank you for reporting this!

Hi jkeeler,

The issue above is fixed and you can download and update the Anywhere Sliders plugin from our web site.

Thanks

Perfect. I will install and test it out.  I will let you know if I have any more issues.

Thanks again.

Do we need to upgrade to Nop 3.2 in order for this upgrade to work or can we keep our 3.1 install?

I didn't realize you were using nopcommerce 3.1. The fix was added in 3.2. If it is possible then I would advice you to upgrade to 3.2 as it contain a lot of improvements and bug fixes.

Thanks