Well i had my site set up the same way, and i am quite positive that i checked and verified that all the process including the guest only pages when i set that up and it worked fine.
However for some reason something has changed with regard to running that same process on 1.6 and rather than try to figure out what exactly changed, i thought it better to just go over how to recover and make it work again for those of us that use the same setup.
Issue: If you had your site set up with the sign-on page as the index page on 1.53, after updating to 1.6 you find that all of your guest pages go right to the sign-on page rather than to the guest page.
Issue Example: FAQ page should take you to the FAQ page when you are a guest but instead now it takes you to the sign-on page. And the same with all your guest pages.
Discovery: I discovered that it is a either or situation. If you set your permissions in admin (guests can view) to NO, then all of your guest pages will go to the sign-in page now when you click on them. However if you set (guest can view) to YES then you get the actually index page and not the sign-in page by default. So it appears you cant have it both ways out of the box anymore.
Fix and setup: Here we will not only go over the fix for this issue but also the setup process (as best i remember it because i am not doing it all again sorry). And if i miss something we can add it to this post.
If you already had your site setup like this on 1.53 then you need to go through this again anyway because there are some things that the update sets back to default so rather then have two different processes here i will just start from the beginning and go through it.
So lets get started.
Setting up sign-in as index for version 1.6
1. Go to your admin pages and make sure all your pages in all sections (main menu, bottom menu, hidden pages) have been edited appropriately regarding viewable by guest and or registered members.
2. Make sure under admin privacy and permissions that "Guests can view the site" is set to YES. (on 1.53 this was NO but we need to change this now for 1.6) If you leave this as no, every footer link you have (not signed in) will go to the signon page and not the page you want.
2a. This will cause guests to now be able to view the main page of your site so lets go take care of that right now before they see too much (or you can do step 3 first and then do step 2 if you are that worried about it)
3. Go to users side and go to the main page and click "customize this page".
3a. Now click on the little gear symbol for ever one of your widgets. You will do this for ever single widget on this page.
3b. Put a checkmark in "Restrict View".
3c. Put a checkmark in everything except Guest, do not check Guest. But all of your other roles you want to see this item put a checkmark in. And then save each widget.
When you are all done with this and you fresh your page (www.yoursite.com), you should be looking at an empty page, other than possibly the header image and the sign in and sign up buttons, if not then you missed a widget.
4. Now for the good part. Now we need to tell the system that if anyone goes to this page www.yoursite.com that you want them to be redirected to the sign-in page instead.
4a. So open up your .htaccess file in your oxwall site root and find the rewrite section that should exist with all oxwall sites. You want to put the following code AFTER any oxwall required rewrite rules.
So to be clear this code should be after everything else on the page (other than for deny ip's section this should be the last thing executed. And then any deny ip should be listed if you have them in there.
so.. example
oxwall rewrite stuff
This code....
deny ip list (if you have them)
here is the code.. Replace yoursite.com with your domain name.
NOTE: i am not a rewrite expert, i did what anyone else does is i put this together by pulling google resources and doing some reading regarding rewrites, so if anyone out there is a rewrite guru and has a better way or if you see this will conflict with something please post and let us know.
#used to send everything from main index to the sign in page
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine
OnRewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.yoursite.com$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://yoursite.com/sign-in [R=301,L]
That should do it, now when you go to yoursite.com you should get the sign in page and then click register and then click on one of the guest pages below and it should work..
Enjoy and good job :)