Magento store owners are having a challenge when using rcah 0.1.0, especially for homepage. The nature of homepage is CMS, most content of it static.
Store owners want their visitors (especially first time visitors) to read static content on the homepage, but static content become obstacles filling in the central area of the page when visitors start to click on filters for refined results.
Root category as homepage 0.1.1 is released to address the problem. It conditionally hides the CMS Block on category pages. It only hides CMS Block in Display Settings of a category (category landing_page attribute). Static CMS Blocks used for others purposes (in sidebar, footer, etc) are not affected.
I must say the conditions when hiding the CMS Block are subtle. Please refer to readme file with the release for details.
Download RootCategoryAsHomepage.tar.gz
Just noticed today if “Use Canonical Link Meta Tag For Categories” is enabled in System >> Configuration >> Catalog >> Search Engine Optimizations, the html head will output a link like
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://MY_DOMAIN/catalog/category/view/s/URL_KEY/id/ROOT_CATEGORY_ID/” />
This is a invalid link because Magento native code won’t allow root category page be accessed. Even if it is valid, the canonical link of root category should be “http://MY_DOMAIN/”.
The point of using my rcah module is making a perfect homepage. I am going to release 0.1.2 to fix it.