Retain the logo but remove all other elements of header and footer

Question

The Magento Ver is 1.9 and the theme is a variant of the rwd theme. For a home page design I need to remove the header and footer completely but retain only the logo. I have tried this with the following code in layout update CMS page :

<reference>
<reference name="root">
<remove name="header"/>
<remove name="footer"/>
</reference>

The above code also removes the logo.

The following code retains the logo but also some other elements like Account Icon, search icon & 2 lines etc

<reference name="header">
<remove name="top.links"/>
<remove name="welcome"/>
<remove name="breadcrumbs"/>
<remove name="minicart_head"/>
<remove name="top.search"/>
<remove name="catalog.topnav"/>
<remove name="accountLinks"/>
<remove name="menu"/>
</reference>

Is there any way to just retain the logo and remove every thing else ?

Answer 1

It is not possible, with layout update only, to retain the logo and remove everything else.

The reason is that the logo is called in the following template : app/design/frontend/rwd/default/template/page/html/header.phtml.

And you can see, in this template, a lot of other parts as Menu, Account, search links, etc.

You should copy/paste this template in your theme and remove what you want to remove.