[thelist] Separate landing pages -- and custom "home" links.

Bill Moseley moseley at hank.org
Fri Nov 5 12:51:58 CDT 2010


Say I have a site targeted at different types of users -- perhaps a school
site for students, teachers, and administrators.

There's a generic index.html home page.  Now, we want to send out email to
the three types of users, linking them to a targeted home page:
student.html, teacher.html, and admin.html.  Those pages will act as the
site's home page for each type of user.

All the other pages are the same -- all three user types will see the same
/about.html, for example.

All the pages on the site have a "home" link.  What we want is if someones
starts on student.html then the "home" link will take them to back to
student.html, not the generic index.html page.

A few options I can think of:

1) set a cookie to remember the user type (set when visiting student.html,
admin.html, teacher.html) and then:
   a) rewrite every "home" link when rendering the page to point to their
custom home page, or
   b) do a redirect to their custom home page if /home.html is requested and
a cookie is set.

2) Use a URL prefix like /student/index.hml and a rewrite rule so that
/student/about.html, /teacher/about.html, and just /about.html all point to
the same page.

3) Use a query parameter, but would have to make sure all links on every
page included the query parameter.




-- 
Bill Moseley
moseley at hank.org


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