In the Site Name field is the text that will appear in the title bar of the browser when a user visits your Joomla web site (usually it is the name of the web site). By default, this field is set to the name you originally gave for your web site. However, this field allows you to change the web site name anytime after Joomla installation.
The Site Offline field tells visitors whether your Joomla web site is temporarily shut off for a maintenance task. When you’re performing a maintenance task on your web site (these tasks might include installing new extensions, adding or editing content, and so on), you can set the value of this option to Yes to inform visitors that the web site is currently offline. They will receive a message (which you enter in the next field) that tells them about the unavailability of the site and when it will be available again. If users visit your web site while you’re making changes and you haven’t set this option, your visitors will get a Page Not Found error message and won’t understand why they can’t view the site.
Note If you see an error while saving the global setting, visit this web page for the solution:
https://docs.joomla.org/Cannot_save_Global_Configuration_changes.
The text in the Offline Message field will be displayed to the visitor if the Site Offline option is set to Yes. You can use standard HTML code in the message entered in this field (e.g., <br />) to break the message into multiple lines).
The editor you select from the Default Editor drop-down list will be used as the global default editor for creating or editing content items (articles) on your web site. This editor will be used for both front-end and back-end purposes.
By default, the editor is TinyMCE, which provides a standard toolbar that’s helpful for most editing and formatting tasks. TinyMCE is a platform-independent, web-based, JavaScript HTML WYSIWYG editor control that can very easily be integrated into a CMS. It is an open source, lightweight editor that’s Ajax-compatible. It loads quickly and supports multiple languages through the use of different language packs. To see the toolbar that TinyMCE provides, select the title of an article from the Article Manager to open it in the TinyMCE editor; an example is shown in Figure 10-2.
Keep in mind that you can always install more editors, so let’s do that now. From among the many editors that are freely available on the Internet, I downloaded JCE Editor, a lightweight, fast, advanced, feature-rich editor. This editor has the same sophisticated interface as Microsoft Word, making the content management task much easier. The editor has image and document management capabilities that assist in uploading and administering files within the editor’s GUI. Its archive file name is com_jce:246.zip. You can download it from the following address to your local disk drive: www.joomlacontenteditor.net/downloads.
To install the editor, invoke the Extension Manager by selecting Extensions ➤ Extension Manager. You’ll see a page like the one shown in Figure 10-3. In the Extension Package File section, click the Browse button to locate the archive file and then click the Upload File & Install button.
Once the editor is installed, you’ll see this message: Installing Component Was Successful (see Figure 10-4).
In the Site Settings section of the Site tab of Global Configuration, you can see an extra option in the Default Editor list: Editor – JCE, as shown in Figure 10-5. Let’s select it to see what facility it provides.
If you now edit an article by selecting its title in the Article Manager, the article will open in the JCE Editor and you’ll see its toolbar, as shown in Figure 10-6. This toolbar looks quite a bit more advanced than that of the TinyMCE editor.
Here are some advantages of using JCE:
- It makes adding and editing jobs very
- It has familiar Office-like buttons for formatting content and performing common editing tasks: cutting, pasting, deleting, inserting, and so
- You can easily create links to other Sections, Categories, and Articles in your site using the Link
- It implements integrated spellchecking using your browser’s Spellchecker (or PSpell and ASpell).
Now, let’s return to the rest of the settings in the Site tab of Global Configuration.
The Default List Limit drop-down list determines how many items can appear in a list. By default, its value is 20, which means that if you’re looking at the articles list on your web site (from the front end), you’ll see the articles in a group of 20. If you have more than 20 articles, they’ll appear on the next page (or pages). You can change the value of this option to any value from 5 to 100, in increments of 5.
For example, suppose that there is a category named Electronics that displays a list of all articles under the Electronics category. Assuming that there are seven articles in the Electronics category, and the length of the list is the default (20), all the titles of the articles will appear on the first page (see Figure 10-7). The list length is also displayed in the drop-down list that appears on the extreme right above the list. You can even change it from the front end to set the desired number of articles to be displayed at one time, but this setting is temporary and vanishes when you select another menu item.
If you set the list length to 5 in the Global Configuration settings, you’ll see that only 5article titles appear in a list at one time, and again the, pagination occurs if there are more articles. The links are displayed as 1, 2, Next, and End to navigate to any page, as shown in Figure 10-8.
Upon clicking the 2 link to see the second page, you’ll see the titles of the articles, as shown in Figure 10-9.
Back to the Site Settings tab; the Default Feed Limit drop-down list determines the number of content items to be shown in the specific feed. By default, its value is 10. You’ll create a Feed Display module for checking this setting. First, open the Module Manager by selecting Extensions ➤ Module Manager. From the toolbar, click the New icon to create a new module based on the Feed Display module type. From the list of module types, select the Feed Display module type. The new module page appears, as shown in Figure 10-10.
In the Title field, specify the title of the module as Show Feed Display. In the Feed URL field, specify the URL of the RSS feed as http://rss.news.yahoo.com/rss/sports. Note that the Feed Items field must be blank (no values showing), or else the value will override the Global Configuration settings. For example,
if the value in this field is 3, the number of items displayed by the RSS feed will always be 3, no matter what value you specify in the Feed length drop-down list of the Global Configuration settings. Because you want to display only the feed titles and not their descriptions, set the Feed Title field value to Yes and set the Feed Description and Feed Image field values to No.
Because the default value of the Default Feed Limit (in the Site Settings tab) field is 10, a total of 10 Items are displayed in the RSS feed from the front side of the site, as shown in Figure 10-11.
If you set Default Feed Limit to 5, the front end of the Joomla web site will show 5 items of the RSS feed, as shown in Figure 10-12.
Again, let’s go back to see the rest of the settings in the Site tab of Global Configuration (by selecting its icon from the Control Panel or choosing the System ➤ Global Configuration option).
The Feed Email drop-down list determines whether to display the e-mail addresses along with the RSS/newsfeeds. It has three options: Author Email, Site Email, and No Email. If Author Email is selected, the e-mail addresses of the feed authors will be displayed. Similarly, if Site Email is selected, the front end will display the web site e-mail address (if any) of the site from which the feeds are accessed, along with the feed contents.
Source: Harwani B M (2015), Foundations of Joomla!, Apress; 2nd ed edition