3 If you are the admin of a Friendica node, you have access to the so called **Admin Panel** where you can configure your Friendica node.
5 On the front page of the admin panel you will see a summary of information about your node.
6 These information include the amount of messages currently being processed in the queues.
7 The first number is the number of messages being actively sent.
8 This number should decrease quickly.
9 The second is the messages which could for various reasons not being delivered.
10 They will be resend later.
11 You can have a quick glance into that second queus in the "Inspect Queue" section of the admin panel.
12 Then you get an overview of the accounts on your node, which can be moderated in the "Users" section of the panel.
13 As well as an overview of the currently active addons
14 The list is linked, so you can have quick access to the plugin settings.
15 And finally you are informed about the version of Friendica you have installed.
16 If you contact the devs with a bug or problem, please also mention the version of your node.
18 The admin panel is seperated into subsections accessible from the side bar of the panel.
22 This section of the admin panel contains the main configuration of your Friendica node.
23 It is separated into several sub-section beginning with the basic settings at the top, advancing towards the bottom of the page.
25 Most configuration options have a help text in the admin panel.
26 Therefore this document does not yet cover all the options
32 Set the content for the site banner.
33 The default logo is the Friendica logo and name.
34 You may wish to provide HTML/CSS to style and/or position this content, as it may not be themed by default.
38 This option will set the default language for the node.
39 It is used as fall back setting should Friendica fail to recognize the visitors preferences and can be overwritten by user settings.
41 The Friendica community offers some translations.
42 Some more compleate then others.
43 See [this help page](/help/translations) for more information about the translation process.
47 Choose a theme to be the default system theme.
48 This can be over-ridden by user profiles.
49 Default theme is "duepunto zero" at the moment.
51 You may also want to set a special theme for mobile interfaces.
52 Which may or may not be neccessary depending of the mobile friendlyness of the desktop theme you have chosen.
53 The `vier` theme for instance is mobile friendly.
59 You may find a lot of spammers trying to register on your site.
60 During testing we discovered that since these registrations were automatic, the "Full Name" field was often set to just an account name with no space between first and last name.
61 If you would like to support people with only one name as their full name, you may change this setting to true.
66 By default, OpenID may be used for both registration and logins.
67 If you do not wish to make OpenID facilities available on your system (at all), set 'no_openid' to true.
70 #### Multiple Registrations
72 The ability to create "Pages" requires a person to register more than once.
73 Your site configuration can block registration (or require approval to register).
74 By default, logged in users can register additional accounts for use as pages.
75 These will still require approval if the registration policy is set to *require approval*
76 You may prohibit logged in users from creating additional accounts by setting *block multible registrations* to true.
81 #### Maximum Image Size
83 Maximum size in bytes of uploaded images.
84 The default is set to 0, which means no limits.
90 This configures the URL to update the global directory, and is supplied in the default configuration.
91 The undocumented part is that if this is not set, the global directory is completely unavailable to the application.
92 This allows a private community to be completely isolated from the global network.
96 By default, each user can choose on their Settings page whether or not to have their profile published in the site directory.
97 This setting forces all profiles on this site to be listed in the site directory and there is no option provided to the user to change it.
102 Set to true to block public access to all otherwise public personal pages on this site unless you are currently logged in.
103 This blocks the viewing of profiles, friends, photos, the site directory and search pages to unauthorised persons.
104 A side effect is that entries from this site will not appear in the global directory.
105 We recommend specifically disabling that also (setting is described elsewhere on this page).
106 Note: this is specifically for sites that desire to be "standalone" and do not wish to be connected to any other Friendica sites.
107 Unauthorised persons will also not be able to request friendship with site members.
109 Available in version 2.2 or greater.
111 #### Allowed Friend Domains
113 Comma separated list of domains which are allowed to establish friendships with this site.
114 Wildcards are accepted.
115 (Wildcard support on Windows platforms requires PHP5.3).
116 By default, any (valid) domain may establish friendships with this site.
118 This is useful if you want to setup a closed network for educational groups, cooperations and similar communities that don't want to commuicate with the rest of the network.
120 #### Allowed Email Domains
122 Comma separated list of domains which are allowed in email addresses for registrations to this site.
123 This can lockout those who are not part of this organisation from registering here.
124 Wildcards are accepted.
125 (Wildcard support on Windows platforms requires PHP5.3).
126 By default, any (valid) email address is allowed in registrations.
128 #### Allow remote_self
132 #### Proxy Configuration Settings
134 If your site uses a proxy to connect to the internet, you may use these settings to communicate with the outside world.
135 The outside world still needs to be able to see your website, or this will not be very useful.
139 How long to wait on a network communication before timing out.
141 Default is 60 seconds.
142 Set to 0 for unlimited (not recommended).
144 #### UTF-8 Regular Expressions
146 During registrations, full names are checked using UTF-8 regular expressions.
147 This requires PHP to have been compiled with a special setting to allow UTF-8 expressions.
148 If you are completely unable to register accounts, set no_utf to true.
149 The default is set to false (meaning UTF8 regular expressions are supported and working).
151 #### Verify SSL Certitificates
153 By default Friendica allows SSL communication between websites that have "self-signed" SSL certificates.
154 For the widest compatibility with browsers and other networks we do not recommend using self-signed certificates, but we will not prevent you from using them.
155 SSL encrypts all the data transmitted between sites (and to your browser).
156 This allows you to have completely encrypted communications, and also protect your login session from hijacking.
157 Self-signed certificates can be generated for free, without paying top-dollar for a website SSL certificate.
158 However these aren't looked upon favourably in the security community because they can be subject to so-called "man-in-the-middle" attacks.
159 If you wish, you can turn on strict certificate checking.
160 This will mean you cannot connect (at all) to self-signed SSL sites.
162 ### Auto Discovered Contact Directory
172 This section of the panel let the admin control the users registered on the node.
174 If you have selected "Requires approval" for the *Register policy* in the general nodes configuration, new registrations will be listed at the top of the page.
175 There the admin can then approve or disapprove the request.
177 Below the new registration block the current accounts on the Friendica node are listed.
178 You can sort the user list by name, email, registration date, date of last login, date of last posting and the account type.
179 Here the admin can also block/unblock users from accessing the node or delete the accounts entirely.
181 In the last section of the page admins can create new accounts on the node.
182 The password for the new account will be send by email to the choosen email address.
186 This page is for selecting and configuration of extensions for Friendica which have to be placed into the `/addon` subdirectory of your Friendica installation.
187 You are presented with a long list of available addons.
188 The name of each addon is linked to a separate page for that addon which offers more informations and configuration possibilities.
189 Also shown is the version of the addon and an indicator if the addon is currently active or not.
191 When you update your node and the addons they may have to be reloaded.
192 To simplify this process there is a button at the top of the page to reload all active plugins.
196 The Themes section of the admin panel works similar to the Plugins section but let you control the themes on your Friendica node.
197 Each theme has a dedicated suppage showing the current status, some information about the theme and a screen-shot of the Friendica interface using the theme.
198 Should the theme offer special settings, admins can set a global default value here.
200 You can activate and deactivate themes on their dedicated sub-pages thus making them available for the users of the node.
201 To select a default theme for the Friendica node, see the *Site* section of the admin panel.
203 ## Additional Features
205 There are several optional features in Friendica.
206 Like the *dislike* button or the usage of a *richtext editor* for composing new postings.
207 In this section of the admin panel you can select a default setting for your node and eventually fix it, so users cannot change the setting anymore.
211 Should the database structure of Friendica change, it will apply the changes automatically.
212 In case you are suspecious that the update might not have worked, you can use this section of the admin panel to check the situation.
216 In the admin panel summary there are two numbers for the message queues.
217 The second number represents messages which could not be delivered and are queued for later retry.
218 If this number goes sky-rocking you might ask yourself which receopiant is not receiving.
220 Behind the inspect queue section of the admin panel you will find a list of the messages that could not be delivered.
221 The listing is sorted by the receipiant name so identifying potential broken communication lines should be simple.
222 These lines might be broken for various reasons.
223 The receiving end might be off-line, there might be a high system load and so on.
226 Friendica will not queue messages for all time but will sort out *dead* nodes automatically after a while and remove messages from the queue then.
228 ## Federation Statistics
230 The federation statistics page gives you a short summery of the nodes/servers/pods of the decentralized social network federation your node knows.
231 These numbers are not compleate and only contain nodes from networks Friendica federates directly with.
235 Some of the addons you can install for your Friendica node have settings which have to be set by the admin.
236 All those addons will be listed in this area of the admin panels side bar with their names.
240 The log section of the admin panel is seperated into two pages.
241 On the first, following the "log" link, you can configure how much Friendica shall log.
242 And on the second you can read the log.
244 You should not place your logs into any directory that is accessible from the web.
245 If you have to, and you are using the default configuration from Apache, you should choose a name for the logfile ending in ``.log`` or ``.out``.
247 There are five different log levels: Normal, Trace, Debug, Data and All.
248 Specifying different verbosities of information and data written out to the log file.
249 Normally you should not need to log at all.
250 The *DEBUG* level will show a good deal of information about system activity but will not include detailed data.
251 In the *ALL* level Friendica will log everything to the file.
252 But due to the volume of information we recommend only enabling this when you are tracking down a specific problem.
254 **The amount of data can grow the filesize of the logfile quickly**.
255 You should set up some kind of [log rotation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Log_rotation) to keep the log file from growing too big.
257 **Known Issues**: The filename ``friendica.log`` can cause problems depending on your server configuration (see [issue 2209](https://github.com/friendica/friendica/issues/2209)).
259 By default PHP warnings and error messages are supressed.
260 If you want to enable those, you have to activate them in the ``.htconfig.php`` file.
261 Use the following settings to redirect PHP errors to a file.
265 error_reporting(E_ERROR | E_WARNING | E_PARSE );
266 ini_set('error_log','php.out');
267 ini_set('log_errors','1');
268 ini_set('display_errors', '0');
270 This will put all PHP errors in the file php.out (which must be writeable by the webserver).
271 Undeclared variables are occasionally referenced in the program and therefore we do not recommend using `E_NOTICE` or `E_ALL`.
272 The vast majority of issues reported at these levels are completely harmless.
273 Please report to the developers any errors you encounter in the logs using the recommended settings above.
274 They generally indicate issues which need to be resolved.
276 If you encounter a blank (white) page when using the application, view the PHP logs - as this almost always indicates an error has occurred.
280 In this section of the admin panel you find two tools to investigate what Friendica sees for certain ressources.
281 These tools can help to clarify communication problems.
283 For the *probe address* Friendica will display information for the address provided.
285 With the second tool *check webfinger* you can request information about the thing identified by a webfinger (`someone@example.com`).
287 # Exceptions to the rule
289 There are four exceptions to the rule, that all the config will be read from the data base.
290 These are the data base settings, the admin account settings, the path of PHP and information about an eventual installation of the node in a sub-directory of the (sub)domain.
294 With the following settings, you specify the data base server, the username and passwort for Friendica and the database to use.
296 $db_host = 'your.db.host';
297 $db_user = 'db_username';
298 $db_pass = 'db_password';
299 $db_data = 'database_name';
303 You can set one, or more, accounts to be *Admin*.
304 By default this will be the one account you create during the installation process.
305 But you can expand the list of email addresses by any used email address you want.
306 Registration of new accounts with a listed email address is not possible.
308 $a->config['admin_email'] = 'you@example.com, buddy@example.com';
312 Some of Friendicas processes are running in the background.
313 For this you need to specify the path to the PHP binary to be used.
315 $a->config['php_path'] = '{{$phpath}}';
317 ## Subdirectory configuration
319 It is possible to install Friendica into a subdirectory of your webserver.
320 We strongly discurage you from doing so, as this will break federation to other networks (e.g. Diaspora, GNU Socia, Hubzilla)
321 Say you have a subdirectory for tests and put Friendica into a further subdirectory, the config would be:
323 $a->path = 'tests/friendica';
327 Furthermore there are some experimental settings, you can read-up in the [Config values that can only be set in .htconfig.php](help/htconfig) section of the documentation.