Custom Intro page for discourse

I have a custom Intro page for the discourse forum to tell new visitors about it benefits.I have designed a page through a plugin and is available at location like www.example/home.

I want to make this location(www.example/home) as the default landing location so that when a user hits the Url it lands directly to this location(www.example/home) but at the same time if the root location is accessed from the website itself (ex - clicking on logo that takes you to home location)the same intro page should not be shown.

Any suggestions what could the best possible way to do this?

I don’t want to make any change in discourse code base I will prefer doing it through plugin

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I can see many topics over the Internet with the similar question but none of them is actually answered.So I am tagging some of the senior members of the forum if they could give any clue to the solution otherwise I will close this topic.

@codinghorror @sam @eviltrout @gdpelican @simon @zogstrip @Falco

@Aman_Jagga, a word of advice: you posted your query only 18 hours ago, then proceeded to mention most of the developers 15 hours later. That is a very short period of time. Please consider that there are many things going on here at Meta, and the developers are actively developing Discourse, not staring at the site waiting for queries. Please keep that in mind and have a little patience when asking a question.

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I would suggest that you use a custom field associated to the user which will track if you’ve shown them the intro. If you haven’t, then redirect to /intro. If you have, then do nothing.

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@zogstrip Thanks for the suggestion but I forgot to mention that in any case I am not showing Intro page to the logged in users,I will only show Introduction to non- logged in users otherwise will redirect to topics.

Then you need to store that in a cookie and/or localStorage.

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@jomaxro… It isn’t that I haven’t done my homework.I have found many similar topics posted in the past but none of them got a solution.To give you an example these are few links
https://meta.discourse.org/t/custom-landing-home-page/19478
https://meta.discourse.org/t/redirecting-to-a-new-page-when-visiting-the-root-discourse-page/19428
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/40447750/change-the-discourse-default-landing-page-to-a-custom-page

and there are many more links also but I don’t have a bookmark of the url’s

That’s why I thought of asking the core members of the discourse.Apologies if this is not the the right way to ask.

If you setup your forum so that only logged in users can see the content, you could put your customization on the login page. That would give you something close to how Twitter and Facebook work.

Another easy way to do it would be to put your forum on a subdomain and put the custom home page on a separate site that is on the main domain.

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That’s the most common approach. And the easier too.

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@Aman_Jagga, just to be clear I did not suggest that you failed to do your research, nor did I suggest anything for that matter. I was simply suggesting that 15 hours is a short period of time to start mentioning people or bumping a topic.

If you were a hosted customer and your site was completely down, then sure, one can expect a response quickly. But for a dev request that is non-critical to your site being live expecting an instant response is unreasonable.

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Not sure if this is the same issue but I am really struggling to work out how to get any form of intro/welcome message showing up on my self hosted digital ocean forum. We went through the wizard, put the details where it asked but it doesn’t show up when looking at the site from the ouside. I had a comment by a visitor that the site is just a list of topics with no real indication of what the purpose is or what to do next, like a call to action I guess. How do I set this please?

Banner a post, or simply edit the welcome topic.

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Hi @Falco,

For having a separate home page, should that home page be hosted on the same server as the one the Discourse Forum is installed on? I was planning on creating a custom home page using a WordPress Theme and hosting it on another server, and have a link in the home page pointing to the Discourse Forum page, with the forum on a sub-domain as you have suggested.

My Discourse Forum is installed on DigitalOcean.

Thanks!

When using subdomains, you can host both Discourse and the homepage on the same server, but is slightly more complex. Here are instructions on how to set this up:

Using separate servers requires no special setup at all :slight_smile:

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