Joomla! Discussion Forums

I'm not using it at all, instead I'm using a copy of the Newsflash module to show a selection of articles on the home (front) page. Unfortunately, the Front Page Manager insist on putting the text "There are no items to display" on my front page. I want to get rid of that.

I thought I could edit my index.php to take out the code that loads the Front Page component, but I'm no coder and just screwed it up.

Any ideas? The site is http://tectrucks.officewebsiteonline.com/index.php. Thanks.

Nobody?

If I am understanding you correctly, all you have to do is unpublish whatever menu item is set to the Front Page component. I have done this already on several sites.

I'm not following you. Check my development site at the link in my first post. See the text "There are no items to display" at the top of the middle column? I think that is there because I don't have any items checked to show on the front page via the Front Page Manager. As far as I know it doesn't have anything to do with any menu items, although I could be wrong.

If I could deactivate or unpublish Front Page Manager then that text would go away.(?)

By default, Joomla's 'Home' menu item is linked to the Front Page component. You can see this by going into the administrative end and looking at 'Menu>mainmenu' and in the 'Type' column you see that 'Home' is 'Component-Front Page'. So when you go to the base URL you are accessing the 'Front Page Component'. You can see this if you click the 'Home' menu item, you get the URL http://www.tectrucks.officewebsiteonlin ... e&Itemid=1. And after index.php the question mark is a 'query' for option=com_frontpage,this is the front page component, and Itemid=1 is the item ID you see when look at the menu item in the menu manager (yes there is a reason why the URL's look the way that they do) . The same thing happens when someone goes to the base URL, you just don't see the PHP query. What is puzzling me is how you are getting articles to show on the Front page if you don't have any articles checked to 'show on front page'.

Okay, I get it. You are not using content areas at all, you are using Module positions to show the stories. There isn't really any 'easy' way to solve this as Joomla expects a component in the main area of every page and the mechanism to display content is a component. So even if you made a new menu item that wasn't pointed to the Front Page component and moved it to the top and called it 'home', you would still have to have at least one article published on that page or you will get the same message. By the way why don't you just pull the information out of the module positions that are on the front page and put them in articles and publish them to the front page? That would certainly solve your problem.

I want the top news article and two featured trucks to be randomly chosen from pools of articles and trucks. The Front Page component doesn't do that but the Newsflash module does.

Can I edit a component file somewhere to take out the "There are no items to display" text?

Yep, that one is pretty easy. Open up the file 'english.php', in your 'language' subdirectory directly beneath your base Joomla install in a text editor like notpad. At or about line 119 you will see a line that reads:
DEFINE('_EMPTY_BLOG','There are no Items to display');
you need to change that line to read
DEFINE('_EMPTY_BLOG','');
Now you will still probably end up with an empty line where the text was formerly, but at least the text won't be there. You will also notice in this file all of the other things that you can change such as 'authorise'. If you don't speak the 'Kings english' you can change that to 'authorize'.

Groovy! Done and thanks for your help!