General Settings

General settings range from core configuration, like your Site’s Membership Type, to finer details like Documents and Media indexing options.

Details

Details provides the same menu you filled out when first creating your Site. This allows an administrator to change the description and membership type of a Site.

Membership Options

The membership type can be set as open, restricted, or private based on the privacy needs of the Site. Users can join and leave an open Site at will. To join a restricted Site, users must be added by the Site administrator, but they can request membership through the Sites section of the Control Panel. A private Site works like a restricted Site but is hidden from users who aren’t members.

Site Hierarchies

Sites can be organized into hierarchies. At the bottom of the Details sub-section is the Parent Site section. When you select the parent Site for the Site you’re currently on, a checkbox appears for limiting membership to members of the parent Site.

Pages

Under Pages you can view your Site’s Public or Private Pates, if any exist. If they don’t exist, a Site Templates selector appears for creating pages with a Site Template.

Figure 1: Selecting a Site Template.

Categorization

Categorization helps administrators organize the Site and allows for users to easily find your Site and its content through search and navigation. For more information on using tags and categories, visit the Organizing Content with Tags and Categories section.

Site URL

The Friendly URL option lets you set your Site’s URL paths. Friendly URLs are used for both public and private pages. The public Site base URL is https://localhost:8080/web, and the private one is https://localhost:8080/group. Each friendly URL must be unique.

For example, setting the friendly URL of your default Site to /lunar-resort makes your Site’s public home page’s URL https://localhost:8080/web/lunar-resort/home. The private Site’s URL is thus https://localhost:8080/group/lunar-resort/home.

Note that if you add a friendly URL for your instance’s home page, you should update your instance’s Home URL field so that page requests to http://localhost:8080 redirect properly:

1. Go to Configuration → Instance Settings in the Control Panel.

2. Under Navigation, in the Home URL field enter your home URL (i.e. /web/lunar-resort/home).

Once you’ve entered this setting, page requests to localhost:8080 redirect to the friendly URL of your Liferay instance’s new home page.

You can also configure Virtual Hosts, which connects a domain name to a Site, under Site URL. You can use this to define a domain name (i.e., www.lunar-resort.com) for your Site. This can be a full domain or a subdomain. You can use this to host a number of web sites as separate Sites on one Liferay server.

Figure 2: When configuring virtual hosts, the public and private pages of a site can be configured to different domains.

For instance, if you set this up for the Lunar Resort’s development network, users in that Site would access developers.lunar-resort.com, provided that the Lunar Resort instance’s network administrators created the domain name and pointed it to the Liferay server.

1. With your provider, set the DNS name developers.lunar-resort.com to point to your Liferay instance’s IP address.

2. In the Virtual Host tab for the Developers Site, set the URL to http://developers.lunar-resort.com

This helps users quickly access their Site without having to recall an extended URL. The Site URL option is listed under the General tab.

Documents and Media

The last option is Documents and Media, which lets you enable/disable Directory Indexing. If on, Site administrators can browse your Site’s Documents and Media files and folders. For example, a Site administrator of a Site called Lunar Resort can browse documents at http://localhost:8080/documents/lunar-resort if this option is enabled.

Site Template

If you created your Site using a Site Template, this section appears and displays information about the link between the Site Template and the Site. Specifically, you can see which Site Template was used and whether or not it allows modifications to the pages inherited from it by Site administrators. To learn more about Site Templates and how to create your own, see Building Sites from Templates.

Custom Fields

Custom Fields only appears if you’ve created them in Control Panel → Configuration → Custom Fields. For more information on Custom Fields, see Custom Fields.