Quicktip
But first a quick tip about Tiki.
Sometimes our Tiki has unexpected behavior and doesn't display information as expected before changing settings or undo your last work your first action should be to clear your Tiki Cache.
Go to Tiki menu, Settings, Tiki Cache and clear all cache.
If information is not updated or part of it is missing just rebuilt your unified index.
Tiki menu, Control panels, Search panel and go at the top rebuilt index.
If this is about permission sometimes a log on / log off will simply fix the issue.
Simple tips but believe me when I say that we the Tiki developers do those dozens and dozens of time a day.
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Introduction
Let's start now this Tiki Express Tutorial and quickly customise a brand new Tiki.
This should help you to quickly set up your Tiki website. Note that at the end of your set up and when you start to use
Tiki for the first time as admin you'll be invited to use the Tiki wizard to set up configuration, or mini configuration, depending on what you need it's worth to have a look to understand what Tiki can do for you and also to help you setting those first configuration.
Now let's start.
So here we are on the brand new Tiki 20 and right away I go to Settings, Control Panels and I switch my preferences filter from basic to advanced and I save this as my default. I explained in a previous tutorial why we do that you can refer to my tutorial about Administration Tips.
Now as you can see I have already a warning that my sender email is not set and we gotta set this right away. I go to the General Control panel where I can find four tabs that have a lot of importance when you start:
General Preferences,
General Settings,
Navigation,
Date and Time
Set up the sender email
Now let's put a sender email. I will put my email. There are more things that you can set everything is explained with a tooltip but usually the default work fine. I apply.
Each time that I change something I will have a success green remarks box and also as you can see I can reset to the default value so it’s really safe and you can change setting experiment and roll back.
How to set up your website name
Now another thing that we want you is to have a nice browser title that will appear on the tab and that will be in fact the name of my website. Again a lot of things that you can set here fallback for a Tiki base URL in case of something happen like 404.
Browser title position, browser title display mode and each time you got some tooltip.
Set the date and time preferences
Now that is done I'm gonna apply that and we will go to the Date and Time setting another thing that is important to check when you start your Tiki. You can set the time zone. Automatically Tiki will try to detect the time zone of your server and set it right you can change those settings you can have different date format for long format, short date format, etc, etc and you have also here the display for the date and time selectors. By default Tiki come with a setting that display first month then day then year but you can change this for a more European day/month/year or a more programmer way that is year/month/day.
Whatever you do you can change… Display a 12-hour clock time, what will be the start year when you open a selector what
will be the end year etc. Again I apply my changes. So again I got my green box everything is good.
Change theme and the layout
Now another thing that we will set is the way your Tiki will look, the theme that we that will be used, the layout. For this you go to the Look and Feel control panel and the first tab is the theme where you can select the theme.
By default Tiki is installed with an adaptation of the default bootstrap but Tiki come with several theme that you can select and use and you have a small window on the right side of the screen where you can see a preview of the website or how it will look. Of course this is just a preview this is not all the pages that you can see but that gives you an idea. Other thing that you can change is the nav bar color background, is the fact that the admin will have a theme when your user will have a different theme. A lot of thing that can help you.
Again you got a tooltip you got help and you can revert your changes.
Another important thing is the site layout you can select the single container, the classic Tiki three container header middle footer or the classic bootstrap with a fixed topnav bar. This is usually the one that I use but you are free to use any one of them. You can select choose to have a fixed width so your website is centered in the middle and you can change the size of this width. About the logo and the title we will change it from the modules that... and I will show you that in a few minutes.
Quick code customisation
Other important thing in the Look and Feel is the customization you got here a lot of fields that you can use to insert your own custom JavaScript or some custom code from third-party company like Google like feedblitz like addthis etc.
You can customize this of course you have to be careful because if you enter wrong data here and you crash your Tiki you will have to go back to the database or to reinstall it. So it's a good thing to do it at the start of your Tiki so if there is really an issue you can put back a backup or reset your default database.
Quickly view the log in setting
Now that this is done we're gonna go to the log in control panel, another important thing that you set when you start your Tiki... your website. There are different way to use a website. You can use a website only to display things but you can also use a website with users that are known that I registered and you have to decide the way they will register. So on the registration and login section. As you can see you can set that user can register and when I do this...
You got a lot a lot of settings, parameters and options to help you to set exactly what you want there. You can have a passcode to register. You can, you have by default a CAPTCHA to avoid your Tiki being submerged by bot from all over the world and you can use it. You can also use the Google reCAPTCHA when you set and you register at Google.
You can also set in the registration that not only user register but user informations… are collected to a tracker.
You can force revalidation for the email. There is really a lot of lot of settings. Other important setting about HTTPS as you know now most of the website works in HTTPS and especially for mobile it's very important to have a certificate and to use HTTPS. You can also force things like the log in to be done using HTTPS to avoid anyone getting between you and your server.
What else here ? Yeah username. Very important.
You can force your user to use the email as username and many other settings. You got user name pattern. With this pattern your user can use A to Z, uppercase, lowercase, numbers and some symbols but if you want to use exotic language like Cyrillic or Hebrew you have to add them there if you want your users to be able to write in their own language. Some stuff about password to prevent common password, to force the minimum length of the password... minimum characters, the duration or the life of a password.
That complete I think the first setting that you have to set on your Tiki.
Set your logo and the website title
Oh yeah modules ! I told I say previously that I will show how to set your website title or subtitle and logo you go to the Modules (admin) control panel and here you got by default a module that is logo.
The parameters are all blank so it used in fact the logo and the title that we saw in the previous Look and Feel control panel but from here we can change that.
"My Pinball Website".
"This is a tiki website".
We can have link, alt, title those things are important if you want your website to be accessible to anyone. And image URL. For this we need an image so you can set a path to your Tiki like image/, etc but you can also download an image into your file-galleries and use it so here we got our title we need to change the logo so I’m exiting the modules. I go to the file galleries. I upload a picture.
Maybe on the desktop, yeah why not.
Okay great I got a pinball picture.
It is file ID 1.
Great now I go to Settings, Modules.
I edit my logo module and as image I put simply: "display1"
See the picture.
It is saved.
I exit the module and I have my first website with title subtitle logo, etc. And of course the default installed features that we discussed in a different tutorial.
That’s it for this video I hope you enjoyed this Express Tiki Tutorial and if you have question you can always contact me and I'll be happy to help the best option is to send me an email at me at bsfez.com. You can also post in the comments of YouTube or use my Facebook page and visit my website. If you like that video don't be shy and click on the like icon and share everywhere you think it should be.
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Thanks again for watching and may the power of Tiki be with you.
More information
For information on how to start a Tiki:
https://tiki.org/Getting-Started-with-your-Tikiwiki-Site
https://doc.tiki.org/Tiki-Reference-Guide
https://bsfez.com/article36-Administration-tips-in-Tiki-Video-Tutorial