Administration/System/Global configuration

From Lanius CMS Wiki

When Lanius CMS was installed on the server, a number of configuration settings were implemented. These settings constitute the site's Global Configuration. As a member of the Administrator or Manager group (see User groups), you can modify the site's Global Configuration. The site's Global Configuration settings are modified through the Global Configuration page. It contains the General, Website, Locale, Database and Email tabs. Each tab contains the values for the corresponding settings.

If you want to change Global Configuration setting, follow these steps:

From the System menu, select Global Configuration. The Global Configuration page will be displayed.
Click on the General,Website, Locale, Database or Email tab,depending on which configuration category you'd like to change.
Change the desired configuration setting.
Click on Save button. An information window will be displayed, telling you if the change has finished

successfully.

Click OK. The setting is changed, and you are automatically returned to the Global Configuration page.

Before any modifications are made to the site's configuration, it is important to have a clear understanding of what every setting is referring to.

1 General settings
2 Website settings
3 Locale settings
4 Database settings
5 Backend
6 Email settings

General settings

These settings refer to the general Lanius CMS and server settings.

Enable site compression

On some servers it is possible to enable gzip compression of all HTTP responses served by Lanius CMS. This setting is disabled by default, due to some servers not allowing gzip compression, and some servers having limited CPU power available for the many small requests that are made by Lanius CMS (there is a minor overhead in response compression, usually compensated by the lower bandwidth usage). If there is such a possibility, you should enable it, to save bandwidth.

Max client side upload file size

You can specify the limit for any uploads retrieved by Lanius CMS. The default value is the one retrieved from the PHP configuration at install time, a bigger value will cause errors unless you also update your PHP configuration. This setting also affects uploads sent through the administration backend. If you specify 0, the PHP configuration setting upload_max_filesize will be read and saved into this Lanius CMS setting.

Error reporting

Software is not perfect, and when errors happen, they should be addressed to the Lanius CMS Team. Lanius CMS has an embedded error description mechanism which allows it to properly handle the error conditions. There are two error reporting options available:

Simple - the picture of buggie will be displayed and the specific error message will be shown on its right. You should use this setting on production websites, as it will not break layout and execution flow.
Debug - a detailed error report, containing server and client information (but without any privacy-sensitive data) will be generated. This setting will break layout, but it is necessary when using non-Stable Lanius CMS CMS versions in order to allow developers to fix the bugs.
Custom documentation server

If you specify a URL for this setting (with trailing slash '/'), it will be used to redirect all documentation queries sent to docs.php to the specified URL address. This might be useful if you have different Lanius CMS websites on different servers, and you want to use the fastest one for the documentation. Important: Don't specify URL which is the same as your website's URL, unless you want to trigger infinite circular redirections when accessing any documentation page.

Maximum number of characters for search engine friendly URLs

All pages that might contain spider-sensitive content (looking for keywords and description) will have a suffix on the URL as long as the specified number of characters defined for this value.

Number of row items shown in administration backend tables

Administration backend components mostly show tables with entries to be managed. This field will specify how many rows to use for each page into which the table list will be split.

Default file/directory modes

This is the filemode applied to uploaded files or applied to files (or directories) at second deletion attempt (if they cannot be deleted at first attempt, they are chmod-ed with this value and then the Lanius CMS attempts to delete them again).

Assert mode/owernship/group options

These 3 options tell Lanius CMS to apply a special function call to set mode, owernship or group attributes of files when accessing them for creation or modification. The attribute is changed only when different from the specified value. These options are not guaranteed to work on all systems because of the specific settings or OS limitations. You should better not change these settings if you don't know what you are doing.

Assert mode for new/modified files/directories via chmod - will apply a chmod() call with the specified value
Assert specific ownership via chown - will apply a chown() call with the specified numeric value of the desired UID
Assert specific group permissions via chgrp - will apply a chgrp() with the specified numeric value of the desired UID

NOTE: you must know exactly which octal mode value or UID/GID value should be used. Improper usage will most probably lead to file access errors

HTTP Authentication support

When this option is enabled the website will answer to HTTP authentication requests.

Basic Authentication - available on PHP4/PHP5.
Digest Authentication - available on PHP5 and requires Enable clear passwords option to be enabled

Advanced authentication systems requires some hash calculation on clear-text passwords (for example HTTP Digest Authentication or LDAP authentication).

Enable clear passwords

Lanius CMS by default saves a password in its original form, but instead saves a password "hash". This is a safety measure which also protects users privacy, since neither the administrators can see the original password. When this option is active, the appropriate column of the users table will instead be filled-in with the clear text original password.

Website settings

These settings refer to the website settings.

Website URL

This mandatory field should contain the website's absolute URL. It is generated automatically by Lanius CMS at install time, and should usually be edited in case of website relocation. The website's absolute URL should end with a trailing slash '/' since it will be used for the generation of absolute URL's for some pages.

Website title

This mandatory field should contain the website title.

Website online

This boolean flag (can be set to On or Off) regulates the online status of the entire website. By setting your website offline, the offline message will be displayed and no page will be served through any Lanius CMS component. Users authorized to use the administration backend will be able to access it using the admin.php page. Also, administrators and managers will be able to see the website as online after having logged in.

General keywords

Keywords supplied to the META tag. The specified keywords will be used on each page served by Lanius CMS, followed by page-specific keywords. Feel free not to specify them, considering that the specific data will always be automatically generated.

General website description

Description supplied to the META tag. The specified description will be used on each page served by Lanius CMS, followed by page-specific description. Feel free not to specify it, considering that the specific data will always be automatically generated.

Offline message

This field should contain the offline message shown when the website is offline. It's content is not encoded, so it should contain XHTML-valid markup.

Locale settings

These settings refer to the language settings.

Default language

This setting allows you to specify the default language to be used when the user language is not available. This is also the language in which content and any other data is written on the website.

Database settings

These settings refer to the database settings. Important: Do not edit these settings if you are not sure that the new database settings will work.

Database management system

This drop-down menu allows you to select the database management system on which Lanius CMS should run. The use of Gladius DB is suggested where MySQL, SQLite or any other professional database management system is not available. The following indicators are present on the menu:

Green items - for database systems currently available
Gray items - for database systems available on the current PHP installation, but not packaged with the current Lanius CMS installation (you must add the relative additional adoDB lite driver to this installation package)
Red items - for database systems not available on the current PHP installation
Database name

The database name, which has already been created. Sometimes your hosting provider will not allow you to create new databases, in that case they should tell you the assigned database name. You can read more about databases in section 2.3: Database creation. Of course, you do not need to create multiple databases for multiple Lanius CMS installations, as they can be separated through the table prefix.

Database tables prefix

The table prefix enables you to have different Lanius CMS installations and still use the same database.

Database hostname

The database hostname is the address on which the database server is located. Flat-file database management systems (like Gladius DB or SQLite) don't require this parameter.

Database username

The database username is necessary for some database systems (except the flat-file Gladius DB and SQLite).

Database password

The database username is necessary for some database systems (except the flat-file Gladius DB and SQLite).

Move database

When you select this option every database table will be moved to the new database.

Test database settings

This button allows you to test the connection to a database with the specified values (mostly used for MySQL database).

Backend

These settings refer to the Backend.

Number of row items shown in admin backend tables
Remember filter settings for all views

Email settings

These settings refer to the site's e-mail configuration.

Recipients for site-wide notification emails

This setting allows you to choose the group whose recipients will receive site-wide notification emails regarding:

frontend item submissions (content, FAQ, weblink, image, download etc., depending on the installed components);
contact form emails (with attachments);
new user registrations (depending on the registration component configuration);
forum emails (if there are no moderators defined for forum categories);
log emails (if the relative setting is enabled).
Convert all HTML emails sent from the server to text format

This setting will forcefully convert HTML emails (for example, those queued by the content component on new content submissions) into plain text and send them as text emails.

Split multiple recipient emails (Bcc) into single recipient emails

This setting will force e-mail's sent to multiple recipients through the Bcc header to be split into single e-mail's. It may consume a greater amount of resources to send single e-mail's, but their trust level in antispam filters is usually higher. If you have an alternative server-side e-mail trusting mechanism, it is suggested to not use this feature.

Generate hashcash header for

When this setting is enabled, a X-Hashcash header will be added to all e-mail messages sent, which will increase their trust level in anti-spam filters. If you have alternative server-side e-mail trusting mechanism, you might disable it, as the Hashcash header generation will consume from 0.4 to 2 seconds (usually) for each e-mail recipient to be calculated.