Notifications
The General Settings page items affect your entire community. Here, you can set your site to “Offline - Maintenance Mode” as well as; set your Site Title, Site Description, Keywords and several other important settings. We’ll walk you through each setting.
To get to the General Settings page, when in your Admin panel, navigate to Settings > General Settings.
Putting your site into “Maintenance Mode” prevents your members from accessing the site. Instead of seeing your site, they will see a message that the site is down for maintenance. To set the site to “Maintenance Mode”, select “Offline”. To disable “Maintenance Mode”, select “Online”. Important! Copy the maintenance mode code before saving and leaving the page or you will be locked out of your site.
You can customize the page your visitors see by editing the file /application/maintenance.html By default, the page will look like this:
Note the text field marked "access code". This is the space to enter your “Maintenance Mode Code” (see below for details).
Before you put your site into “Maintenance Mode”, you should take note of your “Maintenance Mode Code”. When you put your site into “Maintenance Mode”, a cookie will be set on your computer allowing you to continue working on the site without seeing the same message your members see. If you decide to use a different computer or want another developer to have access, you'll need the “Maintenance Mode Code”. The code will be randomly generated if you leave it blank - alternately, you can pick your own code. When you enter this code into the field displayed above, you will be granted access to your site. If you have forgotten your “Maintenance Mode Code”, please refer to this article for assistance.
Enter your site's title here. This will be displayed in the HTML "title" tag across your site and will be used as your logo if you choose not to upload an image. The title between the HTML tags has two parts to it. The first part will be your “Site Title” defined here. The part after the "-" will be the “Page Title” which can be edited in the Layout Editor.
If you have several languages on your site, the title can be translated by adding a language variable to your language packs. Enter your site's title exactly as you have entered it here as the key phrase, then provide a translation for it.
If you prefer, you can also add the translation directly to the custom.csv file for your language(s) in application/languages/(language)/custom.csv for example the Spanish file would be found at application/languages/es/custom.csv . At the bottom of our custom.csv we’ve added an example title of “My Community” with the translation as follows:
"My Community";"Mi Comunidad" Clear cache after making phrase changes in order to show the changes on the site.
Enter a brief, concise description of your community. Include any keywords or phrases that you want to appear in search engine listings. This will be the basis for your HTML "meta" description tag. There are two places where you can add data for your "meta" description tag. This “Site Description” will be on every page of your website under the "meta" description tag.
There is also a “Page Description” in the Layout Editor under “Edit Page Info” which will have an area to give each page their own "meta" description tags which will be in addition to the this “Site Description”.
Provide some keywords (separated by commas) that describe your community. These will be the default keywords that appear in the HTML "meta” keywords tag in your page header. Enter the most relevant keywords you can think of to help your community's search engine rankings. There are two places where you can add data for your "meta" keyword tag. This “Site Keyword” will be on every page on your website under the "meta" keyword tag.
There is also a “Page Keywords”description in the Layout Editor under “Edit Page Info” which will have an area to give each page their own "meta" keyword tags which will be in addition to the “Site Keyword”s.
Enter the number of days until users are required to reset their password. Enter 0 if you do not want to require users to change their passwords.
This is a privacy setting that allows you to decide whether you want the public (unregistered visitors) to view your members' profiles. Select "Yes" if you want the public to have access to the profiles by default. Note that this setting can be overridden if the member decides to set their profile privacy to something other than "Everyone". You can decide which options your members have access to on the Member Levels page.
This is a privacy setting that allows you to decide whether you want the public (unregistered visitors) to view your “Browse Members” page (linked by default in the main menu as "Members"). Select "Yes" if you want the public to have access to the “Browse Members” page.
This is a privacy setting that allows you to decide whether you want the public (unregistered visitors) to view your “Search” page. Select "Yes" if you want the public to have access to the “Search” page. If you set this option to "No", the search field (which is in the mini menu by default) will not be visible to unregistered users.
This is a privacy setting that allows you to decide whether you want the public (unregistered visitors) to view your visitor “Landing”page. Select "Yes" if you want the public to have access to the visitor “Landing” page. Note that the visitor “Landing” page is the page that is shown when users are not logged in to the site. This differs from the “Member Home” page which member see when they are logged into the site. You can edit what appears on your “Landing” page by going to the “Layout Editor” and choosing “Landing Page” to edit.
If "No, visitors must sign in to view the main portal page." is selected, then members who are not already signed in will be redirected to the sign in required page and will not see a “Landing” page.
Choose the image that you want to show with the login form on your website. This image first needs to be uploaded in the File Manager.
The application connects to your server (using AJAX) every few seconds to check if there are any new notifications for your users. This setting allows you to determine how frequently you want this process to occur. A shorter amount of time will consume less server resources. If your server is experiencing slowdown issues, try lowering the frequency the application checks for updates.
If you would like to store your static files such as Javascript and CSS files on a CDN hosting site such as Amazon S3, then you will need to enter your custom CDN URL to the CDN site here. For instructions on how to set up CDN Storage, please check out our How to use the Cloud Storage Feature article.
You can use Google's measurement tools for your site to track its progress by entering your “Google Measurement ID” here. The images below have most of our ID blanked out but you can see how we have it set. Don't add the Google code, just put the ID.
To find the Measurement ID, open your Google Analytics property at Google and it'll show the Measurement ID seen in the screenshots below:
If there are any scripts or styles that you want to add to the header of every page on your site, you can add the code into this Head Scripts/Styles text box. Make sure you use or tags if adding scripts or stylesheets.
This step requires you to first upload your desired favicon.ico file in the “File & Media Manager .” To choose your favicon, follow these steps.
Click the drop down selector to choose from the available favicon.ico files. If none are available, please add one in the File & Media Manager. It must be a “.ico” file in order to work.
Save your changes and clear your browser cache. If you don’t see the favicon, check a different browser as some browsers may not fully clear cache.
You can enable or disable the 'Do Not Sell Info' settings in the Footer of the Website.
When done making any changes to the above settings, be sure to click “Save Changes”.
Great work! Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions or need further tutorials. Visit our community to have more interactions with us and other clients or third party developers. We’d love to see you there!