One of the many things that is nice about ))bitweaver(( is the way the Home Page is handled and the number of options available. In this mini-tutorial, I am going to try to explain those options, how they work, and why you should use them. All of these settings are located in Admin/General.

The image below shows the primary settings we will be dealing with. They are the Home Page: and Use URI as Home Page:. The choices for the Home Page are:

• My Home
• Group Home
• Wiki
• Articles
• Custom Home

Of these; Articles, My Home, and Wiki are fairly obvious. Each will make that sections Home Page the Site’s Home Page. Custom Home is a little more complex. When this selected, the “Use URI as Home Page:” field becomes available. Any URL placed in this field will become the Home Page. Some likely places are:

• Blogs – enter blogs/list_blogs.php
• Chat – enter chat/index.php
• Forum (phpBB) – enter phpbb/index.php
• Forum (Tiki) – enter forums/index.php
• Newsletters – enter newsletters/index.php

I think you get the idea – but I did say Any URL. This means that if you want to direct your site to different site – this is the means to do it. Place http://google.com in that field and YourSite.com no longer exists.

bitweaver does have another file that can be used for the Custom Home page. That file is located in the Users directory and is named custom_home.php. Place “users/custom_home.php” in the URI field - will cause you home page to look like this:


Changing the last line in the “users/custom_home.php” to this:

will display ))bitweaver’s(( second Custom Home example:


The difference between them is the Template file being used. Both of the “users/templates/custom_home_2.tpl” files are easy to work with and do not require a programming expert to modify. These were the first files that I worked on.

The final choice is Group Home – and things finally start getting interesting. Group Home allows you to specify one page for your Anonymous Users – A different page for you Registered Users – and Home Pages for any other Group you care to create. Here are the steps that you need to take:

1. Create the pages for each Group. To see one possible example for these groups see: Anonymous Users and Registered Users.
2. Add the Page Name to that Group. This is accomplished on Admin/Groups. Select the each Group and add page name to the Home Page box and hit Save

1. Set the Home page to Group Home in Admin/General.

NOTE: Because a user can belong to many different Groups, each users Home Page is defined by that users Default Group. New users should automatically be assigned to the Registered Group – but existing users may not be. Setting the Default Group is done on the Admin/Users page. Selecting the Key icon for a user - select the Default Group and hit the Set button.


Notice: The home page setting acts as redirect: after the yoursite.com/index.php is requested, it feeds new address to the browser, like yoursite.com/package/index.php.
It is sometimes desirable to set the home page without redirect, mostly for SEO reasons, as search engine spiders persieve redurects as an attempt to manipulate them.
In such cases the easyest solution is to use mod_rewrite:

• check if mod_rewrite is on in your PHP settings (there's some other wiki page explaining how to turn it on if it's not)
• add to the .htaccess line: DirectoryIndex /package/page.php
• set the active package manually by adding to kernel/config_inc.php this line:

  if( dirname( $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] ) == '' ) { define( 'ACTIVE_PACKGE', 'home-package(usually wiki)' ); }

You are set!