BigSpring

It may sound like a simple task - how do I create a blank page in Joomla so I can just full the page with my own modules and not show any content?

Surprisingly, the standard Joomla package (as of version 1.5.18) doesn't have a menu item that will allow you to do this.  Or at least, it's not obvious.

Sure, you can simply create an article and hit the space bar a couple of times... but this will just create a pointless article in your lovely article manager, and also create an ugly space in your content output area.  And it's hardly elegant.

You could maybe assign the menu item a page class suffix and hide the content output area via CSS... but that'll still show up in your source code and it means writing extra CSS code.

My workaround(s)

Below is a workaround for this problem that I used recently on a project.  It's not perfect, but it's the best I could find while producing the least amount of garbage and pointless code.  I've highlighted two options, and I haven't quite decided which one is best yet.

Option 1 - create a blank Section

1. Create a new section in your content manager.  Call it 'blank' or something equally fascinating.
2. Do not create any associated categories.
3. Create your "blank" menu item that you want to use for your module positioning, and select Articles -> Section -> Section Blog Layout from the menu item type tree.
4. In the menu item parameters, select your new 'blank' section
5. Hide everything - description, description image, etc.  Make sure all the advanced and component parameters are also hidden to minimise the code output.
6. Set the #Leading, #Intro, Columns and #Links options to 0
7. In System Parameters, set "Show Page Title" to no.

That's it.  You're done.  That should just output a very small, minimal area with no content or code output, and you can build your modules around it.

Option 2 - Use a wrapper

The second option involves using a wrapper.  This is maybe more elegant because you don't end up with a pointless section in your content manager, but on the flip-side it produces a lot of code that you don't need (iFrames, javascript, etc).

1. Create an empty HTML file and name it 'blank.html' or something equally imaginative.
2. Upload it to the root directory of your Joomla installation
3. Create a menu item and select wrapper from the menu type tree
4. Type the name of your HTML file into the 'Wrapper URL' field (e.g. blank.html)
5. Set Scrollbars to 'no'.
6. Set width and height to 1px
7. In advanced parameters, set all options to 'no'.
8. In System parameters, set the Show the Page Title option to 'no'

In my case I ended up using option 1 because I was not using com_content anyway (I used Zoo for all my content), and because I really didn't want all that pointless HTML and Javascript on the page.

Hope you find this little trick useful, and please leave some feedback if you used it on your site, or if you've found a better way of doing it.