Updating the home page

One of the first things that that you will want to customize in your Blacklight installation is the home page. The home page that ships with Blacklight is not meant for end uses and is instead intended to introduce the developer to the concepts of beginning a new Blacklight site.

Default blacklight homepage

In order to customize the home page text for our new site we will use override Blacklight’s rails partial for the home page text. This is one of the most basic methods of customization.

We can find the content of the home page text in the Blacklight codebase at app/views/catalog/_home_text.html.erb (GitHub). If we create a file with the same name under the same directory structure in our application then we have overriden that file and the one from our application will be served up instead. We cannot stress enough that you only want to override the smallest piece possible. DO NOT copy all of the Blacklight views into your application or you’re going to have a bad time.

If we add the following content to our newly created file and refresh the browser we can see that our file is served up as the home page text instead of the file that shipped with Blacklight.

<h2>Welcome to my new Blacklight app!</h2>

<p>Please contact us if you have any questions.</p>

Updated homepage

You have now used one of the most basic customization techniques to override one of Blacklight’s view partials to deliver your own custom content on the home page.