A splash page is an interim page on a site that asks a visitor to perform an action, such as making a donation or signing up for an email list, before visiting the page they intended.  While splash pages can be annoying to users, they work.  Given their effectiveness, we end up building splash pages for clients quite frequently in the CMS we specialize in, Drupal.

For Drupal 6 development, there is a module called Splash that we like to use.  The Splash module allows you to designate whether to use a single splash page or rotate through a series of options, set how often users see the pages (daily, weekly, etc.) and to control whether the splash page is shown as a webpage or lightbox.

When Drupal 7 was released a little over a year ago, the Splash module was not upgraded.   This left us in a bit of a bind, as we have transitioned most of our work to Drupal 7 and there wasn’t a simple way to create and manage splash pages.  To rectify the problem, we modified Splash to work with Drupal 7 for internal use, and waited to see if the owners of the modules would release an official Drupal 7 version. 

After many months of waiting, we decided it would be best if we took the reigns ourselves and launched a new splash module for Drupal 7. Over a few months, we put together the code (re-wrote all of it), tested it on our end and made it through the extensive Drupal project approval project process. We named the module Splashify, and it is ready for folks to use.

Splashify not only has all the features the Drupal 6 Splash module has, but it sports a few additional goodies:

• Mobile Support: Do you not want the splash page to come up on mobile devices? Or maybe you need a custom splash page to come up for mobile devices? In either case, Splashify gives you full control by giving you specific options for mobile devices.
• Search Engine Friendly: We noticed that with the Drupal 6 Splash module, it often times would end up indexing the splash page as the home page for the site. This is obviously bad for SEO, as you don’t want your home page linked to your splash page in Google. We determined the best way of fixing the problem was to redirect to the splash page through JavaScript. This would make the original home page come up in the search engines, but still show the splash page to site visitors. Problem solved!
• Customize When the Splash Page Comes Up: The splash page can be configured to show up on a specific page of the site (or pages), or on all pages of the site. For example, this allows the splash page to come up when someone clicks on a link to an interior page from the search engines, if you desire. This gives you full control where the splash page shows up on your website.
• Colorbox: Splashify supports using the lightbox jQuery plugin “Colorbox”. We found this lightweight lightbox solution to work well across browsers and to be an effective option for displaying a splash page.

The module is still in development, which means we can use help testing the module and making sure all of the major bugs are ironed out. Let us know if there are any features you would like to see in Splashify!