The first half hour

Six things worth doing right away.

1. Site name and address

Settings → General. The name goes into the tab title, the emails and the footer. The site address is needed for emails and the sitemap: you cannot substitute the “current address” there, because an email goes to a place where there is no current address.

The logo is in the same place. By default it is a mark made of one or two letters of the name, in the colours and corners of the chosen theme — in the header, footer, browser tab and emails; if you change the name, the mark updates by itself. You can set your own mark letters and colour (“Mark letters”, “Mark colour”), and in the “Upload my own” mode put in your own picture. The “Tab icon (favicon)” is optional too: if it is empty, it is built from the letters.

1a. Footer line and date format

Settings → General. Three things people usually want to adjust on the very first day:

• Your own footer line — instead of “© year, site name”. Write whatever you need: a studio name, a year, a link to the terms. If it is empty, the usual line stays.
• Browser tab title — a pattern like “{page} — {site}”. {page} is the page name, {site} is the site name. You can swap them or keep just one. The pattern is not applied on the home page, otherwise you would get “Name — Name”.
• Date format and Time format — how to write dates across the site and in the panel: “12.09.2026”, “09/12/2026”, “2026-09-12” or “12 September 2026”. Time is 24-hour or with “am” and “pm”.

The “Powered by Nex1on” line in the footer is always there — there is no switch for it in the settings. The version number next to it (“Powered by Nex1on 0.9.8”) is shown by default; if you do not need it, turn off “Show the engine version in the footer” in Settings → General: outsiders use the version number to look for known holes.

1b. How long to keep deleted items

Settings → General, next to the cache: “Keep in the bin, days”. The default is zero, which means the bin is not emptied automatically, and deleted items stay there until you remove them by hand. This is deliberate: the engine promises “to the bin”, not “to the bin for a month”.

Set a period if you do not want the bin to grow for years. The cleanup runs once a day together with the other housekeeping — expired sessions and old logs — and clears up to a hundred records per section per night, so that a large bin does not hit the database all at once.

1c. If you need to close the site

Settings → General → “Close the site for maintenance”. While the site is closed, visitors see your page, while you and everyone else with the right to enter the panel work as usual.

It is worth writing that page: a title, a text and “when we reopen”. The text supports markup, with the same buttons above the field as in news: you can use paragraphs, a list, a link to an email. Empty fields are not shown — a site closed for five minutes does not need a form filled in.

For search engines the engine answers “temporarily unavailable” rather than “page not found” during this time, so the site does not drop out of the results.

2. Mail

Settings → Mail. While the sending method is “to a file (development)”, emails go nowhere and are saved in storage/mail. This is deliberate: a freshly installed site must not send anything to anyone.

Choose “SMTP server” and click “Save” — only then do the server fields appear. Fill them in with the details of your mailbox (your hosting gives them out with the mailbox) and click “Send a test”. The email will arrive to you.

The “the server's mail() function” method works almost everywhere and almost everywhere ends up in spam. Use SMTP.

Without mail, password recovery and address confirmation do not work. This is the first thing a site where mail was forgotten trips over.

Sending does not hold up the page: the email goes out after the page has been delivered to the visitor. Talking to the mail server takes seconds, and a person should not wait for them.

3. Hosting schedule

System → Diagnostics → Queue, the bottom panel. Copy the line from there into your hosting's task schedule (usually the “Cron” section of the control panel).

Why, if the queue is processed on its own anyway: it is processed on every request to the site. On a site nobody visits, an email will wait until the first visitor — and that is exactly the email to someone who has just registered and is waiting for a link.

If your hosting has no schedule, that is fine: a site with visitors copes without it.

4. Engine placement

System → Diagnostics → Engine files. The page shows whether the engine code lies inside the folder that the server serves to the outside.

It is right when the code lies higher up. Then it cannot be reached from a browser at all, rather than “cannot, because we forbade it”. On ordinary hosting you cannot do this by hand: FTP is locked into public_html. So the engine moves itself — with one button.

Nothing is deleted: the old files go above the root into a dated folder. The site does not go down during the move. If something goes wrong, everything from before lies next to it and comes back by renaming.

5. Change the password if someone else chose it

Your name in the top right corner → Profile.

6. Site rules, if registration is open

Settings → Users → Rules page address.

When registering, a person ticks “I agree to the site rules”. As long as there is no rules address, they agree to something you have not shown them — and the engine honestly warns you about this on the overview.

Create a page with the rules (Content → Pages) and enter its address, for example /pravila. Then the words “site rules” in the form become a link. And while there is no address, the form asks for consent only to data processing — less, but truthful.

Samples from the wizard. If the “Pages” module is turned on during installation, the wizard creates three drafts in the site language (if there is no text in that language — in English; addresses are always English): the privacy policy (/privacy-policy), the terms of use (/terms-of-use) and a cookie page (/cookies). The text is chosen for the region of your country (EU, Russia, Ukraine, USA or other). These are samples, not legal advice: you fill in the fields in square brackets in place of your details yourself, and the text should be shown to a lawyer. Until you publish them, they are not on the site; on the “Done” page a tip reminds you of this. If you need other ones, undoing the kind and “Remove samples” remove those you have not edited.