2. Configure
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## 2. Configure

The configure page is available to administrators only. Editable options are divided in groups.

The first section allows to define some values for the site, which can be useful or not according to the theme used. The theme can display them using the info tag.

- Name: name of the site;

- Host (domain): the main host for the site (e.g. www.site.com, not the full URL);

- Description: a description of the site (usually inserted into the related meta tag);

- Keywords: some keywords for the site (usually inserted into the related meta tag);

- Author: name of the site author (e.g. for a copyright notice);

- Author full URL: full address of the author's website.

The second section defines some interface parameters.

- Visually editable types: a comma-separated list of file types that can be edited using the wysiwyg editor;

- Use system theme: if this option is selected, the default system theme will be used for the control panel and for all other administrative pages. While it is preferable to use the same theme as the rest of the site, it is recommended to turn this option on while editing themes, so admin pages are always available without errors;

- Prevent hotlinking: if selected, others are not allowed to link to your images and files directly: they must link to pages on your site. A simple window will be shown to state that the file comes from your site. That page won't mention that you're using MeshCMS;

- Use high quality thumbnails by default: if selected, the file manager and the gallery module will create thumbnails with a better quality;

- Resize images on the server when needed: if selected, when an image with a defined size is found in the page HTML code, MeshCMS will replace it with a resized image, so you can safely include a big image in a page and resize it from within TinyMCE. Note that it is recommended to enable high quality thumbnails (see above) when this option is on;

- Modules are collapsed initially in the editor: if this option is checked, you will need to click on a module caption in the editor to modify the module. This has been done to make the editor interface less cluttered when a theme has many modules.

The third section configures the SMTP server used to send mail messages.

- Server name: the name of the server used to send e-mail messages when a visitor compiles a mail form;

- Username: needed if the server requires authentication;

- Password: needed if the server requires authentication.

The fourth section defines more system parameters.

- Page cache: used to activate the page caching. This is highly recommended since the "decoration" of a page is a quite expensive task. If you have much memory (or few pages), you can store cached pages in memory, otherwise save them on disk. By default, a mixed strategy is used: memory storage with fallback to disk. Pages are saved in GZIP format and are sent compressed when the browser supports that (always true with modern browsers);

- Clean HTML code when saving: used to improve quality of generated HTML: if this option is enabled, pages edited visually are post-processed on the server to generate valid XHTML;

- Site map update interval (hours): the validity of the site map. After the specified amount of hours, the site map is recreated and the page cache is emptied;

- Backup life (days): the validity of backup files. Those files are stored in the repository. While there is no interface to manage them at the moment, they are still available in the file system so a deleted file can be recovered in case of mistake using an FTP client or some other shell;

- Hits counting period (days): page hits are counted for some days to allow to sort pages when no other criteria is available. If you change this value, the new one will be used after a restart of the web application;

- Length of page excerpt (characters): length of the part of page that is stored in the site map for fast retrieving (used in the RSS feed and in some modules);

- Always redirect to welcome pages: check this option to ask MeshCMS to check if a welcome file is available when the required URL points to a directory. Usually the servlet container does this, but it is not the case for the default Jetty configuration for example. Setting this option to true allows to achieve a uniform behavior and offers better safety if virtual sites are used (the servlet container is not aware of MeshCMS virtual sites);

- Redirect moved pages if possible: if this option is enabled, MeshCMS tries to redirect not found pages to other ones based on file path. Similar paths are matched starting from the end and going up recursively: a page like `www.site.com/products/someproductline/productname` will be successfully redirected to `www.site.com/somedivision/products/someproductline/productname`;

- Always deny directory listings: check this option to show an error when a directory is required and there's no welcome file within it. Again, you can achieve the same result by configuring the servlet container properly, but if virtual sites are used it is better to make use of this option instead of relying on the container;

- Hide Java exceptions when possible: if this option is checked, MeshCMS tries to catch Java exception and hide its details to site visitors (it will be logged though);

- Redirect the home page to one of the available languages: if this option is checked and there is at least a page whose path is equal to a language code (e.g. /en, /it), requests for the home page will be redirected to the language that matches browser preferences (see Section 2, “Multilingual sites”);

- Disable public access to this website: if this option is checked, you will need to login to see any page of this website.

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