Global settings, chosen by using the Global Configuration menu, enable you to apply global features to your web site. These settings play a major role in the following processes:
- Enabling visitors to create an account by registering on your web site
- Making SEF URLs
- Highlighting the description of your web site in the form of metadata to be caught by search engines
- Getting help screens from a local or remote help server
- Setting the upper limit of the size of MIME files and verifying whether they are valid
■ Note MIME, which stands for Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (an extension done by the IETF of the SMTP), is a specification for formatting non-ASCII messages, including graphics, audio, and video files to be sent over the Internet. Verification of MIME files means ensuring that the MIME file uploaded to your web site is a valid MIME file.
- Setting the session lifetime and caching time
- Configuring mail settings and database settings
- Selecting the local time zone
- Applying compression techniques to increase site performance
Global Configuration can be invoked by either selecting its icon from the Control Panel or choosing Site Global Configuration. It contains five tabs: Site, System, Server, Permissions, and Text Filters.
Site Tab (Global Configuration)
Using the Site tab, you can set a message that your web site is offline, select an editor for managing site contents, set the size of the lists and feeds, specify metadata information for search engines, make SEF URLs, and so on (see Figure 10-1). As shown in the figure, there are four sections within the Global Configuration Site tab (each is described in the sections that follow).
Source: Harwani B M (2015), Foundations of Joomla!, Apress; 2nd ed edition