How to add a custom web apps root page?

[MikeConnolly]

I saw in Jan 2013 System Update the following:

"Render a custom page when accessing the root URL of a Web App. For example, if you have a “blog” Web App, the items can be made accessible at  /blog/my-blog-post, and you’ll have the ability to customize the /blog page"

Could someone point me in the correct direction for instructions on how to make use of this feature. 

Couldn't appear to find a link from the Blog release notes to anything, and also tried trawling through support and forums for a suitable post.

Closest I found was one about using sub-folders for web app items.

I've tried adding a page in website admin, with the same URL as the web app, but it simply throws an error as it clashes with Web App url.

Cheers

Mike

[Liam Dilley · Accepted solution]

Hi Mike.

Because a folder can have a index.html Web apps in the past you could not access that ability. You had to make a page and you could not SEO call it the same as your web app.

SO

Your web app is called Blog.

You can now make a folder in your root called Blog.

In that folder you can create a page and give it a url of index.html

Now when you access the a web app directly - www.yoursite.com/yourwebapp or www.yoursite.com/yourwebapp/index/html you will access that index page.

You can also put other pages under that folder if you want too.

[MikeConnolly]

Once again Liam a fanatastic help!

Cheers

Mike

[PaceCapJim]

Is there still no method for rendering a truly clean web app "root page", i.e., one that uses the exact same "displayed" path to the web app root (/webapp) as used when displaying items dynamically generated by the web app (/webapp/item-name), or does a BC user just have to take whatever SEO hit comes from using a different syntax for the web app "root" URL (the addition of .htm/.html).

Obviously, there's some sort of underlying structural issue with BC's code, so I guess the real question is why BC doesn't care to fix it? It's clearly possible with almost any Apache/PHP based architecture (I know from experience using Wordpress, Drupal, and a couple of ecommerce platforms). Lisewise, according to this post, the same is also possible with IIS/ASP.NET (SEO For ASP.NET Web Sites: URLs ).

Thanks in advance for anyone's guidance.