Sandbox

I'm in the process of developing a site for a local nonprofit and I need some advice on how to configure the front page.

I modified the template from one of the stock Joomla templates.

For the main page in the content area, I want to keep the user1 and user2 blocks displaying, but I want a static content item to always display below



News items 1
News items 2


static content here





Maybe I've just been looking at this too long, but I can't think of how to do this.

If I understand your question, you want a static content item instead of the frontpage blog style content?

You then want to unpublish the "Home" link in your mainmenu, make a new link to your home page static content, name it Home, move it to the top of the mainmenu ordering... and voila!

Yes, that is the way that I have it configured right now, but then the two boxes with latest news and top stories disappear.

I'm going to try making the static page one of the content items and only have that item set to display on the front page and see if that works.

oh you're losing the top stuff? no problem.  Go into Modules, Site Modules, and in the settings for those two modules, make sure their parameters are set to display ALL, versus right now they probably are set to Mainmenu: Home