I haven't used Home pages at all so I thought I would take a shot at learning it step by step. I tried using the online documentation. It might be just me but I found it very difficult to follow and didn't accomplish much at all,
Frustration began at the very beginning where it's presumed you know how to open the home page. I kept searching for it in my grids because I knew it appeared as a tab. After many tries, I found it: View>Home Page. Dead simple in retrospect but it should be given at the beginning of the manual explanation.
Several other cases where I couldn't understand what was said or was unable to do what was suggested (maybe because I didn't fully understand said!). I couldn't tell when I was supposed to be working in the grid using the main menus, or in the HTML using those different menus, and didn't know if HTML view should be set to brouse mode.
No point in minutely describing every problem I had. I'll tackle it again tomorrow with a fresh start.
Comments
I must admit this is one of the functions of InfoQube which I have until now overlooked. Thinking "I must look into that someday".
So prompted by this thread on the forum I have taken a look and I find it is potentially quite useful.
The documentation is less than excellent however.
On the subject of Homepages themselves I think it is a mistake to treat home pages as separate to normal items. In general making exceptions of things almost always complicates things. I feel that if the 'Home Page' were the HTML/Doc pane of a normal item then it would be more understandable and accessible to the new user.
Maybe there could be a grid called 'Home Pages' which contains all the items marked as being a 'Home Page' and they could be arranged as a hierarchy or any way the user sees fit.
But the problem is that there are tokens, strings of characters which when edited are just strings, like [Grids] but when displayed in a 'Home Page' the token is replaced by the thing it is representing, in the case of [Grids] it is replaced by a list of all the Grids in the notebase.
If the 'Home Page' were the document pane of a normal item then there would have to be some mechanism to switch between 'Edit Mode' where you enter or edit the tokens and 'View Mode' where you cannot edit and where the tokens are expanded into the things they are supposed to represent. This would also be ugly and unintuitive.
I don't know how to solve this dichotomy. Perhaps Pierre's current solution is better but I do feel it would be better if the 'Home Page's were more accessible to change. Loading a HTML file from an arbitrary location is hardly an elegant solution. It means there are two representations of the 'Home Page' in the notebase, an item linked to a HTML file which can be edited but represents the tokens as their strings and the actual 'Home Page' which cannot be edited but where the tokens are expanded. This is almost as bad as having an Edit mode and View mode on the same page.
There are some problems with the current situation. Firstly any changes to the HTML page of an item in the notebase don't take effect until the program is closed and re-opened.
Secondly if you change the CSS file the rendering of the 'Home Page' removes the margins from the text and headings on the page. It is rendered correctly in the HTML pane of the item it is linked to.
I think this needs some thought!