Often, when developing Joomla! templates, you find yourself needing to have a home page that is different than the rest of your site.  More times than not, you don’t want to have any articles show up on the home page, but rather have a jQuery slideshow and/or a combination of modules.  If you’d like to add the necessary code to hide the Joomla! main component tag add the following bit of code to your template’s index.php file:

<?php
$menu = & JSite::getMenu();
if ($menu->getActive() == $menu->getDefault()) {
    // Your Joomla! main component tag/code
}
?>

Below shows the before/after of a recent template we developed using the above code:

Before:

<div id="content">
    <div id="leftCol">
        <jdoc:include type="modules" name="left" style="xhtml" />
    </div>
    <div id="rightCol">
       <jdoc:include type="component" />
    </div>
</div>

After:

<?php
$menu = & JSite::getMenu();
if ($menu->getActive() == $menu->getDefault()) { ?>
    <div id="content">
       <div id="leftCol">
            <jdoc:include type="modules" name="left" style="xhtml" />
        </div>
        <div id="rightCol">
           <jdoc:include type="component" />
        </div>
    </div>
<?php } ?>

In this example, we’ve eliminated the entire content area – both left and right columns – from the home page.

Of course, you could always use the same solution for determining pages that are NOT the home page, simply by using the following:

<?php
$menu = &amp; JSite::getMenu();
if ($menu->getActive() != $menu->getDefault()) {
    // Your non-homepage code
}
?>