Control panel ⇒ Settings ⇒ General

This section contains global settings that influence the whole site in general.

Allows to turn the site off for visitors. Herewith, administrators can both log in and view the site and use Control panel.

In this field you can write some text that your visitors will see when your site is offline.

Main site name. It is added to the end of each page heading (title) and is displayed in the site footer and other places.

Home page may have its own title. Site name is not included into it.

Possible options:

• Only widgets;
• Profile / authorization - guests will see the log in form on the home page, while logged in users - their profiles;
• Content - the root category contents of a specified content type will be shown on home page. It is possible to display only those content types that have the «Enable list view on the site» option enabled in their settings.

Here, you can specify a content type, to which its system name will not be added into URL. For example, you have created the «news» content type and the links to its entries look like «/news/9-rossijane-stali-pervymi-na-chempionate-mira.html». If this option is enabled, the corresponding link will look like «/9-rossijane-stali-pervymi-na-chempionate-mira.html».

Keywords that describe your site for search engines. They are displayed in the <meta name="keywords"> tag in the code of each page, except pages that have custom keywords. It is possible to specify several words separated by commas. How to choose keywords?

Short site description for search engines. It is displayed in the <meta name="description”> tag in the code of each page, except pages that have custom description. Some search engines can display the provided description in search results below a link to your site.

If this option is enabled, the keywords and site description that are specified in the settings above, will be displayed only on home page. Nothing will be displayed on the pages on which these metatags were not specified for some reason.

If this option is enabled, the site name along with the main title will be appended to the page title tag. For example, if the option is disabled, the «Blogs» section title tag will contain «Blog stream». If the option is enabled, the title will be alredy supplemented «Blogs stream — InstantCMS 2.0», where “InstantCMS 2.0” is the site name that is specified by the option above.

If this option is enabled, the CMS checks for updates when an administrator logs in and notifies if there are any. The check result is cached in session, i.e. the check for updates is performed once per session.

This option is useful when visitor IP addresses are detected incorrectly, for example, when all visitors have the 127.0.0.1 IP address or the server IP address. However, there may be other reasons of inability to detect an IP in a standard way or incorrect detection, for example, when using CloudFlare. The option defines a key for the $_SERVER array that contains a real IP address of a visitor. Do not change this value, if you are unsure. The default value fits most needs. For example, provide «HTTP_CF_CONNECTING_IP» (without quotes) for CloudFlare.

Theme determines overall site appearance - positions of blocks, colours, design. Here you can select one of the installed themes. The themes are stored in the «templates» folder of the root directory, each theme being in a separate folder.

When switching a theme, keep in mind that new theme Widget positions may differ from the ones of the previous. For this reason, probably, you will have to re-arrange the widgets on proper positions, with regard to a new layout.

Some themes may have additional custom settings. Upon selecting such a theme the «Theme settings» link appears next to the list.

If enabled, when the page HTML-code has been formed, the system will trim extra spaces, line breaks, tabs and other special characters. The page size (in bytes) received by a browser will decrease, however, HTML-code will be completely unreadable.

Allows to choose a preinstalled interface language. Languages are stored in the system/languages folder of the root directory.

Language switching effects only administration elements (such as buttons, service links, etc.). Database data (content, widget and menu item headers, etc.) will not be translated, since all these texts are specified manually by administrator in the Control panel.

The default site time zone. In general, it effects only guests, since registered users can set custom time zone in the profile settings.

Specifies the format of dates that are output by PHP-scripts (there are such dates on the site mostly). You can find the format description here

Specifies the format of dates that are output by custom scripts (for example, by calendar widget). You can find the format description here

Defines which email-sending method InstantCMS will use to send e-mails to users.

It is specified in the «From whom» field when sending letters to users. It is possible to specify a non-existent address (at your own risk).

This name will hint at an e-mail address upon receiving an e-mail.

Access details to your mail server, if SMTP transport has been chosen. To get the details of popular e-mail hosting providers refer to their help centers. For example, read about Yandex mail here

Caching allows to save SQL-query results, thus reducing their number and relieving database load. Enabled caching can improve site performance, however, some information may not be refreshed immediately.

Enables SQL-query cache. It is recommended for weak servers or when there is a large number of simultaneous visitors.

A period of time, after which any cached data is considered to be outdated and is deleted from cache no matter whether it was actually refreshed. Recommended value: 300 - 600

Two options are available at the moment:

Memcached-server access details. Not used, if the «Files» caching method is selected. They are provided by your server administrator or hosting support.

There are options that are usually helpful for developers only. If you aren’t sure about their purpose, don’t enable them.

If enabled, then:

• SQL query errors are displayed revealing the query text and a string of queries that might have led to errors (stack trace);
• information on the number of SQL-queries and cache readings is displayed in the site footer;
• a complete list of SQL-queries for current page (with the specification of files, in which they were called) is displayed in the site footer. In the «default» theme, the list appears when clicking on a query counter in the site footer.

Each page is processed with a delay of 250 milliseconds. It is useful when testing AJAX-queries, for example, to have time to notice whether the loading indicator appears or not.

This tab contains security options.

In this field, you can specify IP addresses that will be allowed to access Control panel, one per line. It means that the CMS will return a 404 error when accessing from other IP addresses. You can specify not only full IP addresses, but also subnets, for example: 192.168.1.* If, for some reason, your IP has changed and you can’t access Control panel, by any means necessary, edit the /system/config/config.php file (for example, by means of FTP), find the line:

'allow_ips' => 'your IPs will be here',

edit it like this:

'allow_ips' => '',

and save the changes.

Back to Site Settings