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First steps

After your first sign-in, the First steps guide is waiting for you on the Dashboard. It has five items; each one leads straight to the right screen and is ticked off once completed. When you no longer need it, the Hide button makes it disappear.

1. Give your site a face

Appearance → Site identity. Choose a template, upload a logo and a site icon, and pick the primary colour and the typefaces for headlines and text. You see the changes immediately in the preview. You turn on dark mode for readers in the same place – the site then follows the setting of their device.

2. Create sections

Content → Sections. Every article belongs to exactly one section; an article cannot be saved without one. The installation created the section News (with sample content, the five sections of a fictional daily); rename it and add more. Sections can have subsections. Their order in the navigation is set by the Order field.

3. Write your first article

Content → Articles → New article. A headline, lead paragraph, text and section are enough. In the top right you choose the Status:

  • Draft – an article in progress, visible only to the newsroom,
  • For review – done, please check (this option is for an author who may not publish on their own),
  • Published – the article is on the site; with a date in the future it is published automatically at that time.

You can delete the welcome article created by the installation. If you loaded the sample content during installation, delete all of it at once in Settings → General → Sample content – your own articles and sections stay.

4. Arrange your page

Appearance → Blocks and layout. Your site opens in editing mode. You add blocks – a list of sections, most read articles, search, custom text and others – with the + Add block button right where they should be, and you drag them with the mouse. At the top you choose the layout: three columns, two, one or full width.

5. Set the newsroom e-mail and mail delivery

Settings → Mail. The site sends newsletter subscription confirmations, reader registrations, new passwords and notifications to the newsroom. The default sending through the hosting server works, but messages often end up in spam. A custom SMTP server is more reliable – see the chapter Operations → Mail for details.

What to do right afterwards

  • Two-factor sign-in for all administrators (My account).
  • Settings → System status – go through the items with an exclamation mark. Each one says what is wrong and where to fix it.
  • Off-site backups (Settings → Backups and updates) – a backup on the same server as the site will not help if you lose the hosting.
  • More people in the newsroom – Administration → Users. An author writes and submits for review, an editor publishes, an administrator manages the whole site.

Extensions

Many features are turned off after installation so that the administration stays uncluttered: news briefs, polls, newsletter, reader accounts and locked content, Web Push, language versions, the advertising system, the public API, the AI assistant and the Claude connection. You turn them on under Extensions in the main menu. Turning an extension off does not delete any data – when you turn it on again, everything is where it was.

Quick control

The keyboard shortcut Ctrl+K (⌘K on a Mac) opens the command palette: type the name of a section, action or article and press Enter. It also works without accents.