SocialEngine Tutorial – Creating your own custom homepage

One of the first things you might want to do with SocialEngine is to start customising the hell out of it. What better place to start then with your homepage? I did a bit of googling for the answer to this and in the end I came up with a relatively neat-ish hack for it which requires minimal set up.

First off you’ll need to head into the layout editor –
Log into your network > Admin > Layout > Layout Editor

This page allows you to add widgets from the menu on the right (you can add stuff like login boxes and member counters etc). However it doesn’t really allow you to scrap the whole thing and start with your own layout completely.

If you want to do this then hit ‘edit columns’ and select the option with only a header, content and footer;

Now drag the ‘HTML Block’ from the available blocks (on the right) into your main content area. You can then click ‘edit’ on the html block and paste in your HTML. I’d suggest just creating your markup in another file and once you’re happy with it just paste it in.

If you want to be able to add a login area then drag that in too and then head to the main page in your browser and copy and paste the html of the login area block. This will allow you then to add your own styles to the login form as well as completely customise your own front page.