A DNN homepage has the same properties as any other page in the site, which is unfortunate, as it is a special case page.

1) The page title: imho the home page should not have a title other than the name of the site. But in DNN, the name is mandatory, which forces me to give it a weird (as in: non-descriptive) title like 'home', 'start', 'welcome', 'intro', or (like dotnetnuke.com does) some slogan.
This gives weird results when you include the home page in the menu. (and if the homepage could have no title, there would be no text in the menu for the home page)

Is there a way to suppress the title of the homepage to be used in the html title?

2) The page URL: imho the home page should not have a url (other than the domain of the site. But in DNN the page get's its own url (derived from the page title) and when the home page is included in the menu, it refers to that url instead of just the root of the site. This causes problems with run of the mill 'highlight current page in the menu'-scripts, as the page at which the user enters the site (/) isn't recognised as the homepage mentioned in the menu (/default.aspx).

Is there a way to force that the homepage is http://mydomain.x/, not http://mydomain.x/welcome.aspx?
And can I force the url of a page instead of having it derived from the page name?

What would be the best of practice to handle the homepage?

In 7.1 this will be fixed and you can choose any name. http://www.dotnetnuke.com/Community/C...

Ah, indeed, the page title overrules the page name as html title, unfortunately it overrules the whole title, not just the page name part. So you lose that the name is nicely combined with the hierarchy and site name to form the html title.

It's not perfect, you need to change the page titles when reusing a site for multiple customers or moving pages around in the hierarchy, but for the home page it will do.


I'm glad to hear you will be able to choose the url name in dnn7.1. I wonder wether you will be able to set the name to "" for the home page and if it will work the same as the page title or respect the hierarchy in the url. We'll see.

With all 3 field page name, page title and url name, you'd be able to independently configure the html title, url and menu text. Although I wonder what the implications will be for multilingual sites.