Nucleus CMS Admin Settings

This document contains information about the administration of Nucleus.

• Skin parts
• Skin vars
• Template items
• Template vars
• Skin & Template vars

You can either allow or disallow your visitors to create their own 'member' account. They won't be allowed to add items to a blog (unless the admin adds them to a team), but they can login to the administration area and change their settings, and even delete or modify the comments they made.

This setting is the absolute URL of the action.php script that comes with Nucleus. Usually it will look like the following

http://hostname.com/actions.php

The 'Add Later' option on add-item forms allows you to mark an item to become visible only at the exact time you've specified. Before that time has come, the item will not be viewable anywhere in the public part of your site.

This date must be in the future, unless the 'Allow posting to the past' option is enabled for the blog to which you want to add the item.

When enabled, you'll be allowed to specify the date on which an item should be added, and to edit the timestamp of already existing items.

When adding items to a weblog, there are four kinds of template variables that you can use in the body text, title or extended part:

• <%popup(…)%> to insert a popup image
• <%image(…)%> to insert an inline image
• <%media(…)%> to insert a media object

Usually, these tags are inserted by the 'insert media' button in the JavaScript toolbar

A so called super-admin has full access to all functions and all weblogs, even if she is not on the blog team.

On top of that: a super-admin has the right to create new weblogs, to change general settings, to change templates, to change skins and to manage the members (creation/ manipulation/ deletion of members).

Usually, there will be only one super-admin, the site administrator.

When the 'include in search' option is selected, the weblog will always be included in searches, even if the search is done on another weblog.

As an example, suppose you have two blogs called 'lifelog' and 'linkdump', with the 'include in search' enabled for 'linkdump'. Now, a search query on 'lifelog' will also search through 'linkdump', while a search query on 'linkdump' will only search entries in 'linkdump'

The option tells Nucleus which skin to fall back to when no such decision can be automatically made. This happens when skin parts are empty, when no blog or skin is implicitly/explicitly selected.

Most users don't need to worry about this setting.

Blog administrators have the following extra rights:

• They can manage the team
• They can edit blog settings
• They can edit/delete all items by all authors (from the blog of which they are admin)
• They can delete the blog

A blog can have multiple admins, but there must be at least one admin at all times.

As a superadmin, you can disallow individual members to login to the admin area.

The 'Update Timestamp' option allows you to change the posting date and/or time of an item. If you changed the content of an item, this is a way bring the story back to the top of your front page.

But, the unique id connected to the item will not change, so your visitors can still find out that the item was originally posted later than items with a lower id.

By default, Nucleus converts linebreaks in your items to <br /> tags, so a linebreak will also show up in your (X)HTML output

Advanced users, or users striving for the semantic web (br tags don't add any information, they're just used for markup), might find this feature annoying, and turn this feature off.

When a member logs in, a cookie is stored in his browser, so she doesn't need to log in again when she comes back the next day. The lifetime of this cookie decided when it will become invalid:

• Session cookies get deleted when you exit the browser
• Cookies with a lifetime of one month will stay on the computer until you don't use/visit the site for a month. Using this option, you'll never have to login again (unless you've logged out yourself, or logged in from another computer)

These settings are advanced settings. Normally, you shouldn't change them at all. In that case, cookie path is a simple slash ('/') and cookie domain is empty.

Normally, this should be set to 'no'. You should only set it to 'yes' when you have a HTTPS url and want cookies only to be sent over such a https connection.

You can setup Nucleus to store a cookie in which the time of the visitors last visit is stored. This can be used to put indications next to new items.

This is the blog that will be used when no other blog has been specified in the request.

The default skin selected in the blog settings is the skin that should be used when the blog is displayed, and there is no other skin selected (through arguments in the URL)

It's possible to disable your entire Nucleus site. You might want to do this when you are doing some configuration, or when something went horribly wrong

The URL that needs to be configured is an URL to which the visitor will be redirected.

Exceptions: the admin-area is still available, and super-admins can still see the entire site. (don't forget to re-enable your site afterwards )

Draft items are not yet viewable in the public blog. They might come in handy when you are working on a story, and something comes in between. Your draft items will be listed on the main page, so you can continue your work when you have the time to do so.

When editing drafts, choose the 'Add now' radiobutton and hit the 'Edit item' button to make them visible.

Items have an optional extended part that you can use for continued stories. e.g. when a story is too long to put on the main page of your blog, you can write an introduction in the body part and the rest in the extended part. When viewing your main blog page, you will then see 'read more' links (as defined by the templates).

If you want to write an introduction only for some of your items, you could use the smartbody template variable to make a selection out of the body text and the extended text.

You can choose a language to be used when nucleus creates content for you. The content generated by Nucleus includes the admin-area, the error messages, forms in skins, …

There are two places where a language can be chosen: the global site settings include a language option. Next to that, logged in members can override this setting if they want to.

When both of these settings are invalid, 'english' is used as the default language.

Note: Extra language files can be downloaded from the Nucleus Website. (opens a new window)

This is the maximum number of comments that will be shown on the main page. This is NOT a restriction on the total number of comments that can be made. On the detail pages, all comments will be shown, even if there are more than the maximum amount chosen.

Note: Inside templates, this variable can be overridden by an optional parameter of the comments templatevar.

Nucleus allows you to upload media files (images, video, sound, …) to your website

Some settings are needed to do this:

• Media dir: location on the server where the media files will be saved (local filesystem)
• Media URL: location of the media files
• Allow upload: It's possible to disable file upload
• Allowed filetypes for upload: a bunch of extensions uploaded files can have (seperated by commas, case insensitive)
• Max. upload file size: Puts a limit on the size of uploaded files
• Prefix Media Files: When this option is turned on, uploaded file will be prefixed with the current date. Uploading a file named 'bunny.jpg' on April 8, 2003 will then result in a file named 20030408-bunny.jpg. The reason why you might want to do this, is when you're uploading tons of files, and don't want problems with duplicate names.

Each member has his own private collection of media files. Next to that, subdirectories that are under the media dir are seen as global collections (shared between members).

Uploading is only possible when a member is on the team of at least one of the blogs, to prevent abuse.

For the privacy of your members, you can hide all e-mail addresses and allow members to send an e-mail message to each other through the script. The message that will be sent out will however contain the e-mail addresses of both users, so they can then do continued communication through regular e-mail. This service can be disabled.

By default, non members cannot use the message service (because there's no way to check the validity of the e-mail address they enter). You can relax this restriction by allowing non-members to use the message service too. When submitting a message, they will be asked to enter their e-mail address, which will show up in the From: headers of the e-mail you receive.

When you allow creation of member accounts by your visitors, this setting defines whether or not accounts created in that way will have the ability to login to the administration area.

This option contains one or multiple e-mail addresses to which notification e-mails should be sent when new comments are added. Leave empty if you don't want notification. The given e-mail addresses must, of course, be valid.

If you're using multiple addresses, you should use a semicolon (;) as a separator.

Note: As the maximum length of the settings fields is 128 characters, there's only a limited amount of e-mail addresses you can list.

Note: When you set up your own e-mail address as notification address, you won't get notified of the items/comments that you wrote yourself. Assuming that you know what you wrote, that shouldn't be a problem.

The available parser options are described below.

Parser properties

The IncludePrefix and IncludeMode properties can be set globally for a skin in the general settings of a skin. Also note that from the moment a property is set, it applies to all parsed data, thus also for templates.

When updating your weblog, you can choose to send an update notification (ping) to weblogs.com. This website provides a list of recently updated weblogs to everyone who requests it. Lots of websites are using this data, so you might receive some extra hits when enabling the ping.

Note: For this feature to work correctly, you need to fill out both the weblog URL and the weblog name in the blogsettings.

This setting is the base URL for plugin admin areas. Usually it will look like the following

http://hostname.com/nucleus/plugins/

Nucleus allows you to install custom plugins, adding extra functionality. Plugins can do different things:

1. Act as a skin variable
2. Act as a template variable
3. Hook into events generated by Nucleus. The 'move up' and 'move down' links in 'manage plugins' screen can be used to define the order in which plugins will be called when such an event occurs. The first plugin in the list will be called first, the last one will be called last.
4. Act as actors when called through action.php

Note that the responsibility for plugins is entirely with the plugin author. He should make sure that everything works fine.

When this option is enabled, non-logged in members cannot add comments using the same name as registered members. The reason to do this would be to avoid guest impersonating members.

The short blog name is used mainly in the admin area to indicate which items are associated with which blog.

It can also be used in alternative index files, to make a second weblog available:

<?
        include('./config.php');
        selectBlog('myshortblogname');
        selector();
?>

Weblogs, templates and skin should all have a short name next to the full name or description.

A short name consists of only the characters a-z and 0-9, and cannot contain spaces

Display names are used for members. They can contain a-z, A-Z, 0-9 and spaces, but the spaces cannot be placed at the beginning or end of the name.

This setting is the base URL for the Nucleus skins directory. Usually it will look like the following

http://hostname.com/skins/

If the time on your server is not equal to the time where you live, you might want to add an offset to the server time in order to get the correct time. Use negative values to subtract (negation sign). The current server time is listed as a reference.

If your local time is 20:35 and the server time is listed as 14:35, you'll need to set the time offset equal to 6 in order to get your blog time to 20:35

Note: Fractional offsets can be used as well, for people living in half time zones. e.g. an offset of 1.5 equals an offset of 1 hour and 30 minutes.

The following conversion specifiers are recognized in the format string (taken from the PHP documentation for the strftime function). More info in the Open Group Specification

• %a - abbreviated weekday name according to the current locale
• %A - full weekday name according to the current locale
• %b - abbreviated month name according to the current locale
• %B - full month name according to the current locale
• %c - preferred date and time representation for the current locale
• %d - day of the month as a decimal number (range 00 to 31)
• %H - hour as a decimal number using a 24-hour clock (range 00 to 23)
• %I - hour as a decimal number using a 12-hour clock (range 01 to 12)
• %j - day of the year as a decimal number (range 001 to 366)
• %m - month as a decimal number (range 1 to 12)
• %M - minute as a decimal number
• %p - either `am' or `pm' according to the given time value, or the corresponding strings for the current locale
• %S - second as a decimal number
• %U - week number of the current year as a decimal number, starting with the first Sunday as the first day of the first week
• %W - week number of the current year as a decimal number, starting with the first Monday as the first day of the first week
• %w - day of the week as a decimal, Sunday being 0
• %x - preferred date representation for the current locale without the time
• %X - preferred time representation for the current locale without the date
• %y - year as a decimal number without a century (range 00 to 99)
• %Y - year as a decimal number including the century
• %Z - time zone or name or abbreviation
• % % - a literal '%' character

Nucleus can edit a file for you whenever a new item is added to the blog. The contents of that file will be a timestamp of the last change. The use of such a file could be useful for services which check a file on your server once in a while to see if there were updates, and generate 'updated weblogs' from that. Pointing them to your main blog could cause false update warnings to be sent out when visitors add comments or when you change something to the skins or templates.

When you don't need an update file, just leave the field empty.

Please note that the location of the update file is relative to the admin-area, so you might want to use an absolute path (something like /path/to/your/website/update.txt). Also make sure the update file already exists and is writable (chmod it to 666 if you want to be sure).

Using this option, you can switch between URL styles:

• Normal: URLs looking like http://host/index.php?itemid=1234
• Fancy: URLs looking like http://host/item/1234

Note: In order to get the 'Fancy URL' mode working, some extra actions are required. They're described in the Tips & Suggestions.