How Site Settings works

Site Settings is where you change the words, pictures, colours and switches of your public site. It is divided into 19 sections, and each is saved by itself. Read this page once and every section will feel familiar.

Who can open it

Site Admins and Admins. A Manager has no Site Settings item in the menu and is sent back to the dashboard if they try its address. See The three kinds of admin.

Open Site Settings

1. Log in to the admin panel.
2. Choose Site Settings in the menu, or the Site Settings tile on the dashboard.
3. Choose a section from the list on the left. You start on Choir.

Site Settings open on the Choir section, with the list of sections down the left and a small dot beside the sections that have been changed

The sections

Section	What it holds	Explained in
Choir	Your name, logo, place, currency and time zone	Your choir's name, place, currency and time zone, Your logo and browser-tab icon
Theme	Colours and fonts	Choose a ready-made theme, Change your colours, Change your fonts, Add a custom style sheet
Features	Tick boxes that turn pages and parts of the site on or off	Switch pages and features on or off
Home: Hero	The top of the home page	The top of your home page
Home: About	The About Us section and your leaders	About your choir and its leaders
Home: Concerts	The wording around your concerts	The concerts section of your home page
Home: Promo boxes	Up to three boxes under the concerts	Promo boxes on your home page
Gallery	Headings for the gallery page and its preview on the home page	Headings for the gallery and past events
Past events	Heading and introduction of the Past Events page	Headings for the gallery and past events
Tickets page	The wording of the Tickets page	Your Tickets page
Donate page	The wording of the Donate page, and giving by card	Your Donate page
Auditions page	Everything on the Auditions page	Your Auditions page
Pop-up notice	A notice shown over the site	Show a pop-up notice
Past directors page	Everything on the Past Directors page	Your Past Directors page
Resources page	Everything on the Resources page	Your Resources page
Contact	Your contact details, social media and the "Join us" box	Contact details and social media
Footer	The foot of every public page	The footer
Member portal	The portal's name, login wording, voice parts and member list	Set up the member portal
Email	The sign-off and footer of your emails	The sign-off and footer of your emails

On a phone or a narrow window

The list of sections becomes one drop-down box labelled Section, above the settings. A section you have changed has (changed) after its name.

Site Settings at phone width, with the Section drop-down at the top in place of the list

The dot beside a section

A small dot beside a section's name means the section has been saved on your site, so it no longer simply follows the defaults. Under the list it says: "A dot marks a section changed from the defaults in site.config.json."

A section keeps its dot until you reset it, even if you later type the original wording back in. On a site we host, Choir has a dot from the start, because your choir's name was saved when the site was created. The guided setup saves several sections too.

Change a section and save it

1. Choose the section.
2. Change what you want. The kinds of box are explained in Filling in settings.
3. Select Save at the bottom. A short Saved message appears at the bottom right of the screen.

Save can only be pressed once you have changed something. It saves the section you are looking at, all of it, and nothing else. The public site shows the change straight away; View site, at the top right of the section, opens your home page in a new tab so you can check. A page you already had open needs reloading.

Change your mind

• Discard changes puts the section back as it was when you last saved. It asks no question, because nothing saved is lost.
• Reset to defaults puts the whole section back to the defaults. It only appears for a section that has a dot.

To reset a section:

1. Open the section and select Reset to defaults.
2. A box asks, for example, Put the "Home: Hero" section back to the defaults? and warns: "The defaults are those in site.config.json. Your changes to this section are lost."
3. Select Reset to defaults to go ahead, or Cancel.

A reset cannot be undone. Everything you had written in that section is gone, and the message Reset to the defaults. appears.

What "the defaults" are

The defaults are the sample content the product comes with: a made-up choir called Harmony Community Choir, with sample wording in every section. Resetting Home: About, for instance, brings back the sample choir's text and its two sample leaders, not an empty section.

On a site we host

The wording on screen mentions site.config.json. That is the file the sample content is kept in. You cannot see or change it on a site we host; read it as "the sample content".

On a self-hosted site

site.config.json is a file in your installation, and you can change it so that your own wording is what a reset brings back. See Ship your own defaults: site.config.json.

Leaving a section with unsaved changes

If you choose another section before saving, a box asks Leave without saving? and says "You have unsaved changes in this section."

• Stay here keeps you where you are, with your changes still in the boxes.
• Leave without saving throws them away and opens the other section.

The Leave without saving? box, with the buttons Stay here and Leave without saving

warning

The question is only asked when you move from one section to another. If you go to another part of the admin panel, log out or close the tab, unsaved changes are lost without a question. Save first.

If something goes wrong

When a section cannot be saved, a red message appears above the settings and nothing is saved. It names each box that has a problem, with the box's label first:

Message	What to do
Choir name: is required	Fill in the box. Choir name, marked with a *, is the only box in the Choir section that must be filled in.
…: is too long (120 characters at most)	Shorten the text.
…: must be a web address, an email address (mailto:...) or a path on this site	Correct the link. See Link boxes.
…: must be a colour such as #1a2b3c	Use the colour picker, or type # and six figures or letters.
…: must be a number, must be at least …, must be at most …	Type a number within the range.
…: has too many lines (5 at most)	Remove some lines from a "one per line" box.
…: has too many entries (4 at most)	Remove an entry from the list.
Time zone: is not a time zone we know. …	Choose a time zone from the list.
Could not save or Error saving settings	Try again. If it keeps happening, the server has a problem: get help.

A problem inside a list is shown with the entry's number, for example Statistics[2].value: is too long (20 characters at most) for the second statistic.

A problem with a picture you are uploading is shown in red under that picture's box instead. See Upload a picture into a setting.