Drupal Articles » Drupal home page creation techniques » Methods of creating Drupal home pages » Creating a page-front.tpl.php template file
The page.tpl.php file is where you place "highest level" HTML structure of your site (e.g. the <html>, <body>, etc tags). You can create a separate "overridden" version of your page.tpl.php file to design a slightly modified or even completely different template for your home page - this is done by making a file in your theme's directory called page-front.tpl.php (read more about page-front.tpl.php).
Benefits of this technique
- Quick and easy
Drawbacks of this technique
- This method has a drawback of forcing you to maintain/synchronize changes to multiple versions of your main template (if possible, I recommend using only page.tpl.php for the single main/primary template of your site, and using the more granular templates to customize the sub-elements that appear inside that... e.g. different versions of node.tpl.php for different Content Types with node-nameoftype.tpl.php diles, Views templates, block.tpl.php, etc). Using page-front.tpl.php would be a good option if you had a substantially different theme between the front and inner pages of your site (which from a usability standpoint is usually a bad idea), so you'd have two templates anyhow - but if the overall XHTML template/framework is consistent throughout your site, it's advisable to keep only one copy of it for you to have to worry about. You can also make significant changes between your home page and sub-pages, with no changes to the underlying HTML, using just CSS - especially if you assign a unique Class / ID to every page's
<body>tag.
