Settings

Site Management

 

Clicking on the Your Site Settings link from the Site Admin Panel will display a set of five expandable panels titled: Site Settings, Contact Info, Time and Locale settings, Contents and Comments, followed by a Save Changes button. Below that is a 6th panel titled Change Username and Password. You can expand or collapse each of these panels by clicking on the title (link) or the Panel button (if your panels use buttons). We’ll go over what each panel does.

Your Site Settings

This panel’s settings provide information to popular search engine crawlers used by Google, Yahoo, AltaVista, etc.

Website Title: Give your site a short name you want to have indexed by popular search engines. It is also displayed in the the visitor’s browser header.

Home SEF: Search Engine Friendly links must be entered in lowercase only with hyphens (no spaces) between words. By default, “home” links to the page where your regular posted articles display. You can create a new page to be your Home page. If you create a page called “Welcome” to display as the Home page, insert “welcome” here (all lower case). If it is called “Welcome to My Site”, you would insert “welcome-to-my-site”.

Default Description META: This is used to provide a site-relevant description in search engine results pages (SERPs) with the popular search engines. Insert a short, content-relevant description for your site here. Example: If your website sells tools for wood carvers, you would use a description that included highly popular wood carving tools that you sell… “My Site – your best source for wood carving tools, knives, curved blades and replacement knife handles”.

Default Keywords META Tag: META keyword tags provide more information that popular search engines crawlers come across while indexing your website pages. Choose keywords that best describe your site’s content. Limit your list to 10 – 15 unique words or phrases with the most important ones at the start. Keep keywords or phrases separated by a comma, with no comma after the last word.

Contact Information

Visitors to your site may choose to contact you about something using your Contact Page. Information submitted from the Contact Page will be sent to your e-mail address. If your e-mail address is not inserted here, Contact Page submissions will vanish into thin air. Enter the E-mail address where you want to receive contact submissions. Whatever you enter in the Contact Form Subject field will appear in the subject line of e-mailed submissions you receive. Use words that will make them easier to recognize in your e-mail in-box.

Time and Language Settings

Chances are you will never need to change the first two settings in this panel, but you may want to change the third, which formats the way the time is displayed in the information line (if activated) under an article.

sNews Language: This is the name of the language file used to display the text used throughout the website interface. By default, your site uses the EN (English) language. Do not change this unless other language files have been installed.

Default charset: The character set specified determines how your content is displayed. Some languages require different character sets to display properly. Do not change this unless you understand what charsets are all about.

Date Format:
• The format d.m.Y. H.i displays the date and time as 28.12.2007. 14:31.
• If you replace the periods with hyphens – d-m-Y H.i, the date will display as 05-12-2007 14.31.
• A lower-case d, m, or y will display the day, month or year in the 2-digit format: 28, 12 or 07.
• An upper-case D, M, or Y will display as: Tue, Dec, or 2007.
• Using H.i will display the hour 1 to 24 and the minute (1 to 60).
• Changing that to h.i will display the hour 1 to 12, followed by the minute.
• And, removing the H.i altogether means the hour and minute will not be displayed.

Contents

Articles per page limit: The number in this field is the number of articles that will be displayed on any page that has more than one article posted to it. Set this to “5”, for example, and upt to five articles will display on a page.

RSS Articles Limit: If your website has the RSS feed feature active, the number of RSS articles listed will be limited to the number set here.

Use Page as Home Page: “None” is the default setting, which means the home page will be the Home Page. If you decided to have the Home link lead to a newly created page, from the Site Settings Panel (at the top of this page), then you will need to select it from the drop-down field.

Display new articles on home: Check this block if you want all new articles to display on the Home page you selected in the field above. Leaving it un-checked will allow you to assign your articles to any category page.

Display Pagination on articles: Check this block when you have many articles to display on one page but you want them displayed on several pages with your Articles per page limit set to “3”. With up to six articles posted, three will be posted on the first page… a set of pagination links ( << First < Previous [1 / 2] Next > Last >> ) will be displayed at the bottom… leading to a second page. If more than six articles were published to a given page, then it would be split again with the links added to the bottom of the second page.

Display number of articles next to category: When this box is checked, the number of articles posted to a given category will be added to the category name in the Categories menu.

Comments

Approve Comments before publishing: Before publishing an article or page, one of the Customize options lets you choose whether or not to allow visitors to comment on it. When the check-box here is enabled, (see left) all new comments will appear for your review the next time you log into the Main Admin Panel. This lets you edit, approve or delete the comment before it gets published… in case some one posts something unnacceptable.

Comments Order: This drop-down field gives you two options. You can have visitors’ comments displayed with the newest at the bottom (and the oldest at the top) or the other way around..

Comments results per page: Sets the number of comments displayed per page.

Enable Badwords filter: To screen out and replace bad words, check the box. Next, copy and paste bad_words.txt into the Badwords filter file: field below it. Then, insert ***** (or whatever you like) in the Badwords replacement word: field. When a visitor uses a word contained in the bad_words.txt file, it will be replaced by your replacement word.

Change Login Info

Username: When your site is first installed, the default username and password for logging in is usually test | test. If this is the case, you will want to change these so that no one else can log into your Admin Panels. Just replace the username with your preferred username.

Password and Repeat Password: Same story here. Type in your new password in both fields before saving the changes. Be sure to remember your new username and password or record it is a safe, secure place so you won’t be stuck without it.