You might have noticed the "Welcome to the community!" along with the Join and Login buttons on the homepage of your Dolphin 7 website. It kind of overlays the promo (flashy rotating images). There are some that would like to remove or hide this for whatever reason. If you would like to remove the Welcome to the community! from your homepage there are a couple of ways you can do this.

I'll show you several examples and ways you can hide or remove one, the other, or both. You can do this by editing a Dolphin .css or a .php file. Both of which are fairly easy and not really difficult.

Hide Welcome to the community! with .css

Hiding it with .css is probably the easiest method. However, Google does warn against hiding content on a page and they have been known to penalize sites with hidden content. Google seems to be more concerned with things like hidden links and keywords. They have been pushing out major updates at an accelerated rate lately, and we really aren't sure what they will penalize next. So hide things using css if you want, but I would avoid it whenever possible. Even more so when it involves hiding text and links.

Open /templates/base/css/index.css

Find:
#indexPhotoLabel {
height:82px;
line-height:82px;
position:absolute;
bottom:0px;
width:100%;
z-index:1;
background:transparent url(../images/opSplash.png) repeat-x scroll left top;
}

Add:
#indexPhotoLabel {
display: none;
height:82px;
line-height:82px;
position:absolute;
bottom:0px;
width:100%;
z-index:1;
background:transparent url(../images/opSplash.png) repeat-x scroll left top;
}

Save the changes back to your hosting account.

Login to your Dolphin 7 Administration and clear Template and JS/CS cache.

Then, refresh your homepage to verify the changes.

Note:
That will hide both the Welcome to the community!, and the Join/Login buttons.

Remove Welcome to the community! with .php

Open: /templages/base/scripts/BxBaseIndexPageView.php

Find:
<div id="indexPhotoLabel">
{$sWelcomeElement}
{$sLoginSection}
</div>


Remove:
{$sWelcomeElement}


So it looks like:
<div id="indexPhotoLabel">
{$sLoginSection}
</div>

Save the changes back to your hosting account and refresh your homepage.

Note:
That will remove the Welcome to the community!, but the Join/Login buttons will remain.

Remove the Join/Login buttons with .php

Open: /templages/base/scripts/BxBaseIndexPageView.php

Find:
<div id="indexPhotoLabel">
{$sWelcomeElement}
{$sLoginSection}
</div>


Remove:
{$sLoginSection}


So it looks like:
<div id="indexPhotoLabel">
{$sWelcomeElement}
</div>

Save the changes back to your hosting account and refresh your homepage.

Note:
That will remove the Join/Login buttons, but the Welcome to the community! will remain.

Remove both Welcome to the community and Join/Login buttons with php

Open: /templages/base/scripts/BxBaseIndexPageView.php

Find and remove the entire code:
<div id="indexPhotoLabel">
{$sWelcomeElement}
{$sLoginSection}
</div>

Save the changes back to your hosting account and refresh your homepage.

Note:
That will remove both the Welcome to the community! and the Join/Login buttons.

Remove Welcome to the community and the semi-transparent bar, but keep Join/Login buttons

Open /templates/base/css/index.css

Find:
#indexPhotoLabel {
height:82px;
line-height:82px;
position:absolute;
bottom:0px;
width:100%;
z-index:1;
background:transparent url(../images/opSplash.png) repeat-x scroll left top;
}

Comment out the background:transparent line:
#indexPhotoLabel {
height:82px;
line-height:82px;
position:absolute;
bottom:0px;
width:100%;
z-index:1;
/*background:transparent url(../images/opSplash.png) repeat-x scroll left top;*/
}

Open: /templages/base/scripts/BxBaseIndexPageView.php

Find:
<div id="indexPhotoLabel">
{$sWelcomeElement}
{$sLoginSection}
</div>


Remove:
{$sWelcomeElement}


So it looks like:
<div id="indexPhotoLabel">
{$sLoginSection}
</div>

Save the changes back to your hosting account.

Login to your Dolphin 7 Administration and clear Template and JS/CS cache.

Refresh your homepage.

Note:
That will remove the Welcome to the community! and the semi-transparent grey background, but the Join/Login buttons will remain.





Additional:
If you make changes to either of these files:
/templages/base/scripts/BxBaseIndexPageView.php
/templates/base/css/index.css

And Boonex releases an update/patch that contains either you would likely need to reapply the changes. So keep that in mind.

This assumes that the code doesn't change or get relocated in new releases.

At the time this tutorial was posted the current Dolphin version is:
Dolphin 7.0.9