Your first hour

You have installed Kestello and signed in. This page walks you through the admin and the handful of settings worth getting right on day one. Work through it in order; each part takes a few minutes.

Finding your way around

The admin lives at /admin on your site. The menu on the left is grouped by what you are doing:

Group	What is in it
Overview	The home screen: whether the site is healthy, what changed recently, and anything that needs you.
Content	Your pages and posts (and any content types you add), Media and Forms.
People	People (accounts), Roles (what each kind of account may do) and Your profile.
Appearance	Themes, Styles, Templates, Menus and Redirects.
Plugins	Manage plugins, followed by any screens your plugins add.
System	Site Health, Updates, Backups, Infrastructure, File storage, Background jobs, Scheduled tasks, Content types and Settings.

You only see the screens your account is allowed to use. As the first administrator you see all of them; an editor sees far fewer.

View site on the Overview screen opens your public site.

1. Check the overview

Open Overview. The line at the top sums up the site's state:

• Your site is running well. Nothing needs you. Carry on.
• One improvement is recommended (or several). Worth a look this week. Open Review to see what.
• Your site has a problem. Something critical, such as a missing PHP extension or a folder Kestello cannot write to. Fix it before anything else; the message says what to do.

The same checks, with details, are under System → Site Health.

2. Settings

Open System → Settings. The settings are split into groups.

General

Setting	What it does
Site name	Shown in the browser tab, in emails and in the admin.
Tagline	One sentence about the site. Search engines and many themes show it.
Site address	The public address. Make sure it starts with https:// once your certificate works. Links in emails use it.
Timezone	The clock for dates in the admin, scheduled publishing and nightly tasks.

Email

Kestello sends email for password resets, invitations and notifications. Out of the box it hands messages to PHP's built-in mail function. That works on many hosts, but those messages often land in spam.

For mail people actually receive, enter your mail provider's SMTP details:

1. From address: a mailbox someone reads, because replies go there. Use an address on your own domain, such as hello@example.com.
2. From name: usually the site or business name.
3. SMTP server, Port, Encryption, Username and Password: from your mail provider. The usual combination is port 587 with encryption tls, or port 465 with ssl.
4. Save, then use Send a test email to send a message to yourself. Check that it arrives, and that it is not in your spam folder.

The SMTP password is stored encrypted and never shown again. To keep it when you change other fields, leave the password field empty.

Who can change this

Password reset links travel through the mail server and are built on the site address. Whoever controls either could collect those links, so the Email tab and the Site address field need the permission Manage infrastructure, background jobs, scheduled tasks and Site Health, which administrators have. People who may otherwise change settings see the rest of the settings but not these.

Reading

Setting	What it does
Home page	Which page visitors see at your site's address. Leave it empty to let the theme decide (often a list of the newest posts).
Hide the site from search engines	Turn this on while the site is not ready. Every page then asks search engines not to list it. Visitors can still open it. Remember to turn it off at launch.
Entries in feeds	How many recent posts feed readers get.

Media

The defaults suit most sites. Two settings are worth knowing about now:

• Largest upload (MB): the biggest file anyone can upload. Your hosting's own upload limit also applies, and whichever is smaller wins.
• Documents, Audio, Video, Archives, SVG images: what besides images may be uploaded. Images are always allowed. Turn on only what your site needs.

3. Secure your own account

Open Your profile (under People).

1. Under Account, check your name and email address.
2. Under Sign-in & security, turn on two-step sign-in. After your password, Kestello will ask for a code from an authenticator app on your phone. Save the recovery codes it shows you somewhere safe, such as a password manager. They are the only way back in if you lose your phone.

WARNING

If you lose both your phone and your recovery codes, someone with access to the server has to turn two-step sign-in off for you from the command line. Keep the codes.

4. Invite the people who will work with you

Open People and add an account for each person. Give everyone their own account rather than sharing one: Kestello records who changed what, and you can remove one person's access without changing everyone's password.

Pick the smallest role that lets each person do their job. Roles shows what each role may do, and you can create roles of your own. As a rule of thumb: people who write and publish content do not need to manage plugins, themes or settings.

5. Make your first backup

Open System → Backups and choose Back up now. Files (uploads, themes and plugins) are included unless you untick that option; without them the backup holds only the database. The backup appears in the list when it is done.

Nightly backups are on by default. Under Schedule you can change how often they run and how many are kept. Backups made by hand are kept until you delete them.

Anyone with the permission Make and download backups (restoring needs an administrator) can make and download them. Restoring one, or uploading one from another site, is for administrators only: a backup contains the list of accounts, so restoring it decides who can sign in.

TIP

A backup that lives on the same server as the site does not help if the server is lost. Your developer or host can point the backups disk at an outside storage service in config/storage.php; see Backups.

6. Pick a look

Open Appearance → Themes. The built-in theme is active. You can:

• adjust colours, fonts and spacing under Appearance → Styles, with a live preview,
• change what page layouts contain under Appearance → Templates,
• build your menus under Appearance → Menus and assign them to the places your theme offers.

7. Write something

Open Content → Pages and create a page. Give it a title, write in the editor, and either publish it straight away or set a date and time for it to publish by itself. Every save keeps a revision, so nothing you change is lost.

What to read next

• Requirements, if Site Health pointed at something about the server.
• Installing Kestello, to set up the cron job if you have not yet.