One of the first things you might want to configure when you hop into Joomla!
is the Global Configuration.
And just like the name suggests this is where you configure the big pieces of your Joomla! Website.
So let's go ahead and take a look at Global Configuration.
There are several ways you can access Global Configuration from the Control Panel.
It's available here under system;
the second link down is for Global Configuration.
It's available here on the right side of the screen under the QUICK ICONS there
is a link to Global Configuration, and it's over here on the left side of the screen under system.
All three of these links take you to the same place, so pick one and click it
and you'll be located here inside of the Global Configuration.
So this is where we can change many of the big items on this Website, things
like the site name, so the site name is KinetECO, perhaps I really want this
to be KinetECO, Inc. so I could change my site name to that.
The Offline functionality I described to you a little bit earlier while we
were installing Joomla!, let me just show you how that works.
If I put the Site Offline by saying Yes and then I click this big green save
button up here at the top of the page, the big green save button will save my
settings but will keep this window open so I can continue editing.
You'll see a message on the top saying that I just saved this particular page.
If I now click on my icon at the top here, which note now it says KinetECO, Inc.
I can open up another tab and you'll see here, here is my front-end of my
Website but it's now hidden behind a login.
So I can type in my UserName and Password and I can login to the front-end of the Website.
The advantage of doing this of course is that only those who have the login can
see a site while it's under construction.
So I am going to go ahead and turn that back off again because it's a little
bit of a pain in the neck to work with it, while we're just working here on our local machine.
So I am going to set that back to no and click the big green Save button one more time.
You can customize some of the features associated with the Site Offline in the next few blocks.
We can also set our default editor and a couple of other things;
I will be covering some of these in a future video.
Over here on the right side of the screen is where we can turn on or off our
Search Engine Friendly URLs. Those are turned on by default so that's great.
You may want to take a look at some of these other settings when your site gets
to a Web server, but probably the default settings are fine for running this
on the computer that's in front of you.
Include Site Name and Page Titles is a really important thing to turn on.
If you take a look at the front-end of the Website and you take a look here at
the tab where this Webpage is being displayed.
That tab displays the HTML title tag and right now that is set to Home, why
because this is the homepage and Joomla! sets it up as Home by default.
But it's by itself is not a terribly descriptive HTML title tag.
Search engines weight words that are located in the HTML title tag,
actually fairly heavily.
And what's more, if you're trying to bookmark a Webpage, right now I'm
bookmarking something called Home which tells me nothing about what the
site that I'm going to. So, by default Joomla!
ships without this turned on, but it's far better to change this setting because
it will make your page name a little bit more descriptive.
So where it says include site name and page titles, they are talking about this
site name that you set over here in the left column and we're going to change
that to either After, so it would say Home-KinetECO, Inc.
or Before so it would say KinetECO, Inc.-Home.
And some people have philosophies as to whether one is better than another;
I'm going to say Before because I like that better for bookmarking.
You can certainly say After if you think search engines prefer that type of thing.
So by putting this to Before and saying Save again, when I refresh the front-end
of the Website, click on the Refresh icon, you'll see now that my tab says
KinetECO, Inc.-Home, so that's a little bit more descriptive.
But of course the word Home isn't terribly descriptive either.
I'll show you how to customize the rest of this HTML title tag in a future video.
But this is key to the first part of it, at least get the company name in the HTML title tag.
Okay, so down here a little bit further on the page on the left hand side we
have the ability to set up our metadata for this Website including a meta
description and meta keywords.
My understanding is that search engines generally aren't reading meta keywords
these days, so I didn't prepare any of those.
But I do have a meta description; it's inside your Exercise Files.
And if you open that up there's a little bit of text that is located there.
I am going to go ahead and highlight all of that and say Edit>Copy and I'm going
to go ahead right here in this box and do a Ctrl+V or Cmd+V to paste in that
text right here in this box.
And you'll see, well it put in a little funny space there so I'll get rid of that.
You'll see that I have a nice meta description here.
This meta description will display on every page of the Joomla!
Website unless I choose to override it on a page by page basis which I can do
either through an article or through a menu item and I'll show you how to do
that in a future video.
But I think it's a good practice to set a global site meta description, because
they are used in Google and because the keywords that are located here can be
weighted again for search engines.
So, write a short, precise meta description that's full of keywords that people
will use to find your Website and make sure you put it on in here.
The last few parts here that might be of interest to you down here at the bottom
is a thing that says Show Joomla! Version. This does not show the Joomla!
version on the back-end of Joomla! This will show the Joomla! version
in the HTML head of the documents.
So if somebody viewed the source for the Webpage they would see what's called a
meta generator tag, it's another type of meta tag that would indicate that the
site was built using Joomla! 3.0.1
in this particular case, what I am using to record today.
And so some people feel that that is a security issue, so you may not want to
show that and that is in fact why this is turned off by default.
But if you wish to show your Joomla! version in the head of your Joomla!
document you can certainly turn this on, so that's what that's there for.
Alright, scrolling back on up to the top here, there are some additional tabs
here that you can look through.
In general, things that are located under System are things that you're not
going to need to change.
These are things like Cache Settings and Session Settings and
Debugging Settings.
One of the things though that might be helpful to you is the Session Lifetime.
The Session Lifetime is how long can you walk away from your screen while
working with Joomla!
and then return but still be logged in and right now that's set to 15 minutes.
So I can walk away from my computer for 15 minutes or up to 15 minutes and when
I come back I'll still be logged into the back-end of Joomla!, Many people
like to change this to a larger number than 15, in fact I'll go ahead and change mine to 30.
I would not recommend changing your Session Lifetime to any more than about
an hour, 60 minutes.
And the reason why is, you want to automatically be logged out of the site if
for some reason you walk away for an extended period of time, you don't want to
leave yourself logged in as a session, somebody could come up to your computer
and make changes to your Website and it's just generally a bad practice to stay
permanently logged into the back-end of your Joomla! Website, it's a security issue.
So up the Session Lifetime if you wish but don't up it too far.
So I am going to go ahead and hit my greens Save button to take that setting.
Over here on the Server tab there is pretty much nothing here you'll ever need
to change unless you want to change your Server Time Zone.
So right now this is set to UTC or Greenwich Mean Time.
You can change this on a city by city basis, at least for those of us in the United States;
you can also set this on a basis of your country.
So if you hit the down arrow here Africa is listed first followed by America
and America you can find cities here that would be relevant to your particular time zone.
I am here on the West Coast of the United States so I am going to choose
Los Angeles, but you could certainly set this to New York or Indianapolis or some
of the other major cities that would correspond to other Time Zones into the United States.
And if you're in a country where there is only one time zone you'll find your
country listed in the list.
You may eventually want to change something with Mail Settings, you probably
won't need to touch the FTP Settings and you shouldn't need to touch the
Database Settings, you set all of that up as part of your installation process.
Under permissions you'll see that this is where some of the ACL issues come in,
I am going to cover this in detail in the chapter on ACL, the Access Control Lists.
For right now don't touch anything here, it's very easy to break your site messing with ACL.
And then finally there's a tab here for Text Filter Settings, this controls what
kind of HTML tags various levels of users can put into their Website.
I now have a video later where I'd go through this screen in detail.
So, pretty much the only things you're really going to need to touch inside of
the Global Configuration are this first tab, first Site, there are a couple of
issues that you may want to change and then possibly under System you may want
to change the Session Settings to a higher number, but don't go over an hour.
The rest as these tabs are things that you may not necessarily really need to
change or they are things that you're going to change in a different context and
I'll be going through those in many of the upcoming videos.
So for now I am going to go ahead and hit Save & Close and this will return me
to my Control Panel.