“Site” tab:

The most important configuration settings are entered when we install “Joomla” on the server. All these settings can be found in the “Global Configuration” window. You can change a number of these options but some are better off as they are.
Let me go through them once.
To open the “Global Configuration” window, click on the “Global Configuration” button in the control panel.

The “Global Configuration” window has three tabs (1) namely, “Site”, “System” and “Server”.
Let me first start with the first tab, i.e, “Site”.

In the “Site Settings” section, we have the “Site offline” option. If you select “Yes”, here, visitors will be able to view a page where a message that your site is not available, is displayed. The message can be specified in the text box below this option.
In the “Site Name” text box, we can enter the name that will be displayed at the top, in the backend of the site.
In the “Default WYSIWYG Editor” text box, the editor for formatting text in your articles can be selected. The default editor of “Joomla” is rather limited in its possibilities, so I have searched for and found a more advanced editor for you. But, I’ll discuss that, in greater detail, after the discussing the various other options.
In the “List Length” text box, you can determine the number of items which are to be displayed in the backend section under the various items, categories, etc.
The “Feed length” text box is relevant only if your site uses news feeds.

In the “Metadata Settings” section, we have two text boxes, for the description and the keywords. Both of these are filled automatically, by “Joomla”. It is advisable to modify them so that they give a better description of your site, and therefore, your website, displays more search engine friendly content.
The options below these boxes determine whether the title and author should be included in the meta-data of the pages.

We then have the “SEO Settings” section.
With these options, we can determine how to trim the address in the “Joomla” address bar of our browser, in order to display a more search engine friendly URL.
“Joomla” normally gives a very long web address in the browser address bar. To change this you must first rename the “htaccess.txt” file which is found on the server. Please note that “htaccess” shouldn’t have any extension.

After each change, click the “Save” button and take a look at the example in the frontend section of “Joomla”.

 

“System” Tab:

The second tab is the “System” tab.
You shouldn’t change anything in the “System Settings” and “Debug Settings” sections, unless you are asked to do so by someone, eg.: your host.

The options in the “User Settings” section seem clear to me. Perhaps, only the the last option, “Frontend User Parameters”, needs an explanation. When this option is set to “Show”, users logged into the frontend, can change certain parameters such as the language and the editor settings.

We then have the “Media Settings” section.
In the first text box, we can determine which file types users can upload.
In the second text box, you can determine the maximum size of those files.
In the “Path to the media folder” and “Path to image directory” text boxes, you can determine the locations where the images and documents are stored.
In the “Restrict Uploads” radio button group, you can determine whether users with specific access rights are allowed to upload files.
In the box below, set this above the minimum user level.
In the “Check MIME types” option, you can determine whether you want “Joomla” to check the files that a user uploads. This way you can prevent users from uploading unwanted files to the server.
The next two sections seem clear to me.
The “Legal MIME types” and “Illegal MIME types” text boxes indicate the MIME file types that “Joomla” either allows or blocks.

We then have the “Cache Settings” section on the right.
If we select “Yes” for the first option, the page on “Joomla” is stored in a temporary memory, which is the cache memory. This will make surfing faster, because the visitor does not always need to reload the page because it is loaded from the “temporary memory”. If “No” is selected for this option, even if you’re working on the site, the pages have to be refreshed and you see the result, immediately.
The “Cache Time” option seems clear to me, and the “Cache Handler” option has no other options.

Lastly, we have the “Session Settings” section.
In the first text box, you can determine the amount of time a user remains logged in when there is no action performed.
In the second text box, which is “Session Handler”, leave it in the default option, i.e, “Database”.

We will continue in the next lesson

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