Frameless layout - design a custom home page

[louellen_20210224]

RH 2020.7.46, Frameless layout, customized Studio skin

Is it possible to create your own home page to replace the Studio skin home page? I see two options in the layout settings:

1. Select "Use skin home page" on the Layout tab. This gives you a series of tiles for the top-level heads, plus a prominent search box, background photo, etc. See the attached Studio_skin_home_page.png file for an example (I had to make it super-generic so I don't reveal too much 🙂 ).
2. Deselect "Use skin home page". In this case, the help will open on the first topic in your table of contents. This option gives you the usual structure of a topic page with the left and right panels, and the search icon in the header. See the attached topic_page.png file for an example (again very generic).

The project I'm working on has about 25 top-level heads, which is a lot of tiles to show on the home page. Is it possible to design and create a new home page that does show any tiles but still preserves some of the other elements, like the background photo and search box? And could we replace the tiles with elements of our choosing, like maybe some small graphics, short text descriptions, hyperlinks to popular topics, etc. (details TBD). I realize we could design a new topic that incorporates these elements, but then we will get the topic page layout; i.e., it wouldn't be a true home page, just another topic.

I don't see a way to do this, but if anyone has any ideas, I'd love to hear them. Thank you!

[louellen_20210224]

I realize I made a mistake when describing option #2 above. If you deselect "Use skin home page", the help opens on whatever topic you specified as Default Topic on the Content tab; it isn't necessarily the first topic in the table of contents. That's how this project is set up, so I was confused. But the question remains...

[Amebr · Accepted solution]

When you are using the home page, you can also specify another topic which will be placed below the tiles section. This topic could hold your links etc.

For the tiles themselves, you could try setting the TOC Tiles container Display setting to 'none', and see if that works for you. I haven't tried it myself, so am not sure what the implications might be.

[Peter Grainge]

Please use the photo icon to insert images within the post. Seeing an image inline with the text makes it easier for anyone answering or viewing the post.

You can limit the number of tiles by setting a limit but I doubt that is the answer here. Perhaps limit the number of tiles on the first home page by limiting the number of top level sections in your TOC? There is a recent post about how to have no home page or multiple home pages that drill down. https://community.adobe.com/t5/robohelp-discussions/configuring-toc-tiles-in-frameless-output-in-rob...

The tiles themselves can be resized and have different images applied. 

I think a completely new home page would be theoretically possible but I rather doubt it is possible in practice. Man can get to the moon but good luck with your efforts. 🙂 Everything is CSS3 and HTML5 compliant but I suspect the issue would be around knowing RoboHelp's internals.

I guess what you could do is have one top level section in the TOC so that you only have one tile on the first home page that goes to another home page with the remaining TOC tiles. That would leave a lot of space and by editing the skin behind the scenes you could maybe get the other features you want. The skin is in your Publish folder but I wouldn't know how to start editing that. It is a text based file for a start.

Personally I doubt it is possible but don't be put off by that.

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My site www.grainge.org includes many free Authoring and RoboHelp resources that may be of help.

[louellen_20210224]

@Amebr Your suggestions seem to work! I was able to prevent the tiles from showing by setting display to none for the TOC Tiles container in the skin. Then I created a simple topic with some hyperlinks and specified that as the Home Page on the Layout tab of the Frameless preset. In the output, the Home Page topic content was displayed right below the photo and search box (in other words, there was no empty space where the tiles used to be). Fortunately I will be able to work with a designer to come up with the home page we want, but it looks like this could be a solution for us.

@Peter Grainge Sorry, I completely missed the Insert Photos button. I'll try to remember that next time. Also, I completely agree that limiting the number of top-level sections is the right way to go, but for now I'm stuck with the need to get this project out the door the way it is, and then I can reorganize it the way it should be 🙂