How to Configure a New Site

Once you have successfully installed Oscailt you should be able to use it to publish stories immediately. However, you will need to carry out the following steps before your site is ready for the public.

1. Remove the default 'admin' user and create new users.

Log in as user admin, password: admin

For security reasons the very first thing that you should do is to remove the default administrator user log in from the system. If you do not remove this user, you are vulnerable to anybody at all logging in to your site with full administrative privileges. For details of exactly how to do this, see the Oscailt Guide to User Management. You will also need to create at least one new user immediately with administrative roles or you will find yourself locked out of the system!

2. Test Publishing.

To make sure that everything is set up properly, you should go to the publish page (which should be linked from the top bar in index.php) and publish a new story with an attachment. For details of how to publish stories, see Oscailt's Publishing Guide. Make sure that you can view your article and the image attached to it. Once you have done this, you can be happy that your oscailt installation is working and you are ready to get publishing - nearly.

3. Edit the main configuration page.

The main configuration page is at editconfiguration.php (or go to admin.php >> edit configuration). The settings on this page are described in full in the Oscailt Server Configuration guide. Although most of the settings can be safely left at their default values, you will need to change the site url, the site name, the site description and the notification email addresses at least.

4. Set up the Topics, Languages, Regions and Types that you want to support.

Before you start publishing things, you should work out in advance how you want to divide your site up into topics, regions and types of article. You should also decide what languages you want to support. You can always go back and change your mind later on, however, you should bear in mind that if you want to add new categories later on, you will have to recategorise any existing stories to that category once you have done so. You should also bear in mind that, because oscailt supports search engine friendly URLs like http://www.indymedia.ie/anticapitalism or http://www.indymedia.ie/dublin any categories that you rename or delete could cause broken links to your site. So, it is worth putting some time into planning your categories before you start publishing content. Have a look at Oscailt's Guide to organising content

5. Modify any of the default content to suit your needs.

There are various bits of text and various settings in oscailt which you will want to change. In general this is as simple as going to the page which contains the text and clicking the icon to edit that page, then changing the values in the form. Have a look at the Oscailt Data Object Configuration Guide for more details.

6. That's it, you're ready to go!

-- ChekovFeeney - 02 Sep 2005