Elgg: Editing Spotlight Area

Written by Rodolfo Hernandez Saturday, 18 December 2010

After installing Elgg, you will find that there are two boxes at the bottom of every page with some links and description about elgg. This is called the “Spotlight” and it is a great place to put useful links.

The other box under the spotlight is the copyright bar. Here in this guide, we will learn how to edit both the spotlight and the bar under it.

By default, here it is how it looks like:

First, we will get rid of the copyright bar under the spotlight. Removing it won’t get you in problems, it just a matter of design.

On your elgg folder, go to “views/default/page_elements“, then open the file “footer.php“.  Erase the content inside that file. Save it and it will be gone:

Spotlight Powered by Elgg bar gone

To edit the spotlight, on your elgg folder, go to “views/default/spotlight” and open the file “default.php“. Inside that file you will find several “div class” , however we will focus on two which class that are: “spotlightRHS” and “spotlightLHS“.

The “spotlightRHS” class contains a little description about the site and some links. The “spotlightLHS” class has several useful links. For example, I will replace the default code inside the  ”spotlightRHS” and ”spotlightLHS” with the following:

code for spotlightRHS

<h2>Information</h2> <ul> <li><a href=”http://www.arvixe.com”>Arvixe Website</a></li> <li><a href=”http://www.arvixe.com/elgg_hosting”>Arvixe Elgg hosting information</a></li> <li><a href=”http://elgg.com”>Elgg commercial services</a></li> </ul>

code for spotlightLHS

<h2>Welcome to Arvixe Blog!</h2>

<p>

This is an Arvixe Tutorial about editing the spotlight!!!!

</p>

Here is a screenshot of how the spotlight looks after the changes:

Spotlight changed

And we’re done editing the spotlight content.

For more info about Elgg hosting solutions please visit Arvixe-Elgg Hosting

Happy Hosting!

Rodolfo Hernandez