Setting up Channel Preferences for use with eeSiteKit
ExpressionEngine offers a lot of features and flexibility when setting up Channels for your site. If you’re new to ExpressionEngine, all the different settings that go along with that flexibility and those features can be a bit much to comprehend at first.
The following examples are intended as a starting point for new users and as a quick reference for more experienced users who are new to eeSiteKit. You’ll want to study EE’s Channel documentation to fully understand all these settings; we’re just covering enough here to get you started.
Channel preferences are configured one Channel at a time in the Weblog Management area of the control panel:
Site Name › Admin › Channel Administration › Channel Management › Edit Channel Preferences
- You should be in the Channel Management area of the control panel. Choose “Edit Preferences” in the middle column of the row containing the name of the Channel you would like to edit.
- In the left column is the navigation for the whole Channel Preferences editing area. You’ll also notice an “Update” and an “Update and Finished” button near the bottom. You won’t be pressing either of these buttons until we’ve gone through all of the sections in the left column navigation, so wait until the very end.
- General Channel Preferences: You may not need to change anything for this section.
- Path Settings: eeSiteKit doesn’t require you to set any paths at all in this section, so you can delete any that are there, and leave all these blank if you like. There may be situations where you need to set one of these paths, but 99.9% of the time we never use those when using eeSiteKit; and anyone of them could break something eeSiteKit is doing for you, so leave those blank.
- Administrative Preferences:
Default Status: Open
Default Category: None
Select “Allow comments” button in Publish Page by default?: If this Channel will be used as the site blog, then set to: Yes, if not, then set to: No
Select “Allow Trackbacks” button in Publish page by default?: Unless you are familiar with the potential issues of using trackbacks, set to: No
Which field should be used for search excerpt?: Main Content - Weblog Posting Preferences:
Default HTML formatting in weblog entries: Allow All HTML
Allow image URLs in channel entries: Yes
Automatically turn URLs and email addresses into links?: Yes - Versioning Preferences:
Enable Entry Versioning: Yes
Save Revisions During Quicksave: No
Maximim Number of Revisions per Entry: 4 - Notification Preferences: You may leave these blank and set to: No (unless this Channel is to be used for a blog, then you’ll likely want to use some or all of this functionality)
- Comment Posting Preferences: Allow Comments in this Channel?: No (unless this channel is to be used for a blog, then you’ll likely want to use some or all of this functionality)
- Trackback Preferences: Allow Trackbacks in this Weblog?: No
- Publish Page Customization:
Display URL Title Field: Yes
Display Formatting Buttons: Yes
Display Trackback Form: No
Display Author Menu: Yes
Display Status Menu: Yes
Display Date Fields: Yes
Display Option Buttons: Yes
Display Ping Buttons: No
Display Category Menu: Yes
Display Pages Submission Fields: Yes (note: EE Commercial and Personal versions only)
Display “Show All” Tab: No
You may leave the Default Entry Title and the URI Title Prefix empty. - Click the Update and Finished
Repeat these preferences for other Channels.
You may copy the settings of any Channel when creating a new one and prevent having to do this over and over for each Channel.