Your site is almost ready for prime time. Finish set up by selecting the "Preferences" link on the administration page, which is only available after you login. Click the 'Edit preferences' button to change them to suitable values. The function of each preference is described below:

Site name

Populates the <title> tag of your website on the home page, or on pages where you fail to specify a meta title for a piece of content.

Site description

Populates the <meta name="description"> tag of your website on the home page, or on pages where you fail to specify a meta description.

Site author / publisher

Populates the <meta name="author"> tag of your website.

Site email

Populates the <managingEditor> tag in your website's RSS feeds.

Site copyright

Populates the <meta name="dcterms.rights"> tag on your website. Note that this applies to the actual website as a whole. Individual pieces of content (eg. an article) can be distributed under any license you want via the 'Rights' field in the content submission form.

Close site

You can opt to close your site to public access. All attempts to view content will redirect users to the login screen. However, a logged-in administrator can view the site unhindered, even when it is closed.

Server timezone

The time zone your server is located in. It may be used to adjust times for user-side display.

Site timezone

The time zone for your primary target audience, if any. It may be used to adjust times for user-side display.

Minimum search length

The minimum length of keywords that will be allowed on the search page. Shorter terms are discarded. Good practice is to set the value at three characters; anything smaller will return ridiculous amounts of results, while three character acronyms are quite common and useful. If your site is under heavy load you could consider increasing this value.

Search pagination

The number of search results to display on a single page, typically in the range 10 to 20. If there are more results a pagination control will be displayed.

User-side pagination

The number of content items to display on a single index page of your website. Typically 5 to 10 but it depends on your site layout and preference. If there are more a pagination control will be displayed.

Admin-side pagination

The number of content items to display on the admin page of your website. As only the titles are displayed a value of 20 or more is reasonable. If there are more a pagination control will be displayed.

Gallery pagination

The number of thumbnails to display in the gallery page of your website. The gallery displays image files associated with your content items. Less than 20 is a reasonable value. If there are more a pagination control will be displayed.

Maximum pagination elements

The maximum number of page links to display in your pagination controls. It is best to specify an odd number to keep the number of fore and aft pagination slots balanced. A value of 7 is a reasonable starting point but it is personal preference.

Session name

The name that will be given to the sessions used by your site. There's not much reason to change this but you can customise it if you want. It should only contain alphanumeric characters.

Session life

The length of time (in minutes) that an idle session will remain active. The user will be logged out if they do not perform an action within this timeframe.

Default language

Specifies the default value of the content submission form from the list of available languages on the system, so that you don't need to manually select it all the time.

Date format

The format in which you want to display dates on your site. The format is specified using a template, please see the date() function in the PHP manual for full details: http://php.net/manual/en/function.date.php

The default value is “j F Y”, which gives an output like “21 August 2017”.

Enable cache

Reduces load on your webserver. The first time a page is viewed a copy will be saved to your site’s /cache folder. On subsequent views of the same page it will be retrieved from the cache, instead of being rebuilt. Recommend to turn this on.

Note that the cache is automatically flushed every time you add, edit or delete content, in order to ensure that your index pages and pagination controls stay up to date. You can also manually flush the cache with the “Flush cache” link in the admin page.

Cache life (seconds)

Cached content will expire after this amount of time (and be rebuilt and re-cached on the next view). A week is a reasonable time frame for most purposes, but you could set it at a few hours or a month depending on your server load. The default is one week (604,800).