Question

I’m building an administration system on drupal 7. I’m not allowing anonymous users to view published content (for obvious reasons), but I’d like to allow them to view just one single page, the homepage, which has a welcome message and the login form. How can I do that?

Answer 1

I usually build a small module for sites that require custom functionality not provided by modules I use, in this case you could simply build a module with the following in the module file.

mymodule_menu(){
  $items['homepage']=array(
    'title' => 'Home'
    'page callback' => 'mymodule_homepage',
    'access callback' => true,
    'type' => MENU CALLBACK,
  );
  $items['homepage/edit']=array(
    'title' => 'Edit Homepage'
    'page callback' => 'drupal_get_form',
    'page arguments' => array('mymodule_homepage_edit'),
    'access arguments' => array('administer site configuration'),
    'type' => MENU CALLBACK,
  );
}
function mymodule_homepage(){
  return variable_get('homepage_content',''); 
}
function mymodule_homepage_edit(){
  $form['body']=array(
    '#type' => 'textfield',
    '#title' => 'Body',
  );
  $form['submit'] = array(
    '#type' => 'submit',
    '#value' => 'Submit
  );
}
function mymodule_homepage_edit_submit($form, $form_state=array()){
  variable_set('homepage_content',$form_state['values']['body']);
}

you need a .info file for the module with drupal, no frills, pretty self explanatory if you just open up one from another module to see how they look.

The benefit to handling it this way is the flexibility of adding other custom functionality to this same module down the line.