Replace the index screen with a custom HTML page on a Joomla website

Question

Hi there,

I will start by saying that I have basically no experience using Joomla or even really PHP. I wish to set a temporary "new site coming soon" html page as the index screen for the website (a joomla php site at moment but will not be in the near future).

When i checked out the website files I was a little disturbed as there is no index.php/index.html located in the website root directory. I am not sure how exactly the Joomla CMS works (and not to keen to get into it to be honest) but really need to get this temp screen up... any ideas?

Cheers!

Answer 1

The index.php you're looking for is in the templates folder, knowing what templates you're using, go to \joomla\templates\template_name and edit index.php there.

Answer 2

If you do not have an index.php file in the root folder of your installation, you have an incomplete copy of Joomla. However, if your webserver is Apache, index.html usually takes precedence over index.php. You should just be able to upload your own index.html to the root folder for a temporary page.

Answer 3

Suggest the jlleblanc method.

Otherwise you could write an article and post the "coming soon" into it, then publish on the main menu as the default menu item and delete all the other content. This way you'll use the Joomla template.