I would like to setup a nice Dashboard / Community Home Page (Similar to the attached image) that has News, Announcements, etc.. with one of the sections being for them to click into the Forum. Currently when you go to the Community it just goes straight to the forum.

 

How do I setup the main dashboard / homepage to be similar to the below image

This is usually done with the Pages app. You can create a blank page and then put various “blocks“ (also called widgets) on it. This can be done with drag-and-drop. But NOT including the full-width view you have on that image. That requires custom code. 

Gotcha! Great help..

 

I found how to setup that up in my admin portal. Now for a couple more questions (Really appreciate this help)

 

1) How do I make that new 'Page' be the default page that displays when people first visit the community? Currently when they visit the community it brings them right to the 'Forum' page

 

2) If we code out a nice page in HTML is there a listing of placeholders we should use somewhere? For example, if we want the 'News' to be in one area, does invision have a %news% place holder. Same goes for 'Online Members' - If we want to code that in as well, how do we grab that certain piece of data from Invision?

Edited January 18, 20232 yr by Kevin Carroll

 

1) How do I make that new 'Page' be the default page that displays when people first visit the community?

You would first need to set Pages as the default app and then you can also pick any page to be the default (within Pages). 
(Important: Changing the default app can change ALL your community URLs)

 

2) If we code out a nice page in HTML is there a listing of placeholders we should use somewhere?

If you use Page Builder pages, you just drag-and-drop blocks you have created in advance under Pages → Blocks.
If you create a custom HTML page, you add those blocks with their identifier: {block="block-id"}

Edited January 18, 20232 yr by opentype

I see the option "Make default page for this folder" which I selected but the community is still defaulting to the forum page

As explained, you also need to make Pages the default app. 

How do I make it the default app though? Where do I go to do that...

ACP -> Applications page -> click the hollow star icon to the right of the Pages app. It will turn solid, indicating Pages is now the default app.

Then go to ACP -> Pages -> Pages and use the down-arrow menu to the right of the page you want set a home page, and select it as the default Page.

Thank you!!!!!

You're welcome. 🙂