dashboard as home page

Hi, is there a way to set the dashboard as a default home page and customize it by way of template override for visitors not logged in? I did something similar with the unity view but i'd like to keep it public. When i set the dashboard as a default home page it gets automatically redirected to ES login view.

Answer to self: be more attentive when scourging the forum, e.g. http://stackideas.com/forums/es-url-on-the-homepage