No Front

Overview

I had a discussion a couple of years ago about how to best create a Drupal front page that contains no content. That is, we want to build front pages that don't contain normal Drupal node-based content. Our front pages are made up of blocks instead.

A favored theming technique is to create a blank page and then add blocks to contain everything on the front page. My technique is similar, except that for my last site, I simply omitted rendering $content in my page-front.tpl.php file, and created a bunch of custom regions that only appeared there. So what's the problem?

The problem, my friends, is performance.

The empty node method requires a node_load to occur, even though the node contains no content. My method is even worse, because it still runs the default frontpage view to generate content it will never render.

This simple module uses hook_menu_alter() to hijack the page callback for $items['node'] (Drupal's default homepage) and return an empty string instead of generating any content.

Installation

No Front can be installed like any other Drupal module -- place it in the modules directory for your site and enable it. Once enabled, navigation to /node will render a page with no content.