How To Change Edit or Remove The Promo Block in version 6.1x...

I have seen this asked at Boonex Unity a number of times in the last week or so...

How do I change, edit, or do away with the Promo Block? That big image/graphic that rotates and changes on your homepage.

This is pretty simple and easy. Many of you probably know how to do this, but I thought this might help a few of you out there.

You can elect to use no Promo Block in your Admin panel. You can do this by finding "Settings" then "Basic Settings". Then you may choose to "Use a custom HTML block" instead. You will then be able to use the tiny_mce editor. You can even click the html button in the upper right corner of the editor and enter custom html code that would be used instead of the promo block.

If you want a little more control and over your main/index page you can change a number of things with standard html and a little imagination.

The page/file we will need to edit for our homepage/index page is located in your template folder. If you have the default UNI template, then:

yoursite.com/templates/tmpl_uni/page_1.html

If you use another template other than default you will need to replace tmpl_uni above with the actual name of your template folder/directory.

How do we know that page_1.html is the page we should edit?

Our site is:
yoursite.com
or
yoursite.com/index.php

So lets open index.php real fast and a few lines down we will find the following:
$_page['name_index']     = 1;
$_page['header']         = $site['title'];
$_page['header_text']     = $site['title'];
$_page['css_name']        = 'index.css';


The reference to:
$_page['name_index']     = 1;

Tells us we want to look in our template folder and page_1.html

If it said 49 we would look at page_49.html


So in this case let's open up page_1.html at:
yoursite.com/templates/tmpl_uni/page_1.html

And we find:
__include _header.html__
    __promo_code__
    __page_main_code__
__include _footer.html__

Notice the:
__promo_code__

We can either remove this completely like:
__include _header.html__
    __page_main_code__
__include _footer.html__

Or comment it out like:
__include _header.html__
    <!--__promo_code__-->
    __page_main_code__
__include _footer.html__

Which will do away with it completely.

Then we can add or insert our own code. Say we made our own image we could do something like the following:

__include _header.html__
<center><img src="http://www.mysite.com/logo/myimage.jpg" alt="My Site Name" title="My Site Name"></center>
    <!--__promo_code__-->
    __page_main_code__
__include _footer.html__


Or even add html tables, rows, columns, maybe even your own custom flash or animation.

Just use your imagination. Just about any standard html code will be accepted and work.

Add Google Adsense or other Ads. Use it for text or a combination.

Back up your original page_1.html first, and simply restore if you mess up, don't like it, or need to revert back to the original.