Dashboard > Settings > General

1. SETTINGS - General: EasySocial's Admininstrator capabilities let you easily set up your network to meet the needs of your website, and Users.

You can access these settings within Joomla: Components > EasySocial > Settings - It should default to the General settings where you can set the general settings as shown below:

- Lockdown Mode
- Email Transporter Behaviour
- Cronjob Settings
- URL Caching

Go through each of these steps, as it is highly encouraged for you to familiarize yourself with the EasySocial Dashboard to better help you understand how to configure your social network.

Lockdown Mode



Enable lockdown mode: - By enabling lockdown mode, only users with an active account on the network will be allowed to access the site and login.

Allow registrations in lockdown mode: When this option is enabled, new users will still be able to access the network registration area.



Email Transporter Behavior



Process emails on page: If enabled, emails will be processed whenever a user accesses the page. NOTE! It is not recommended to turn this option ON (toggled to YES) unless you do not have access to cronjobs. To learn more about setting up a Cronjob, go to the documentation area:

http://docs.stackideas.com/administrators/cronjobs/cronjobs

Sender name: Specify a custom Sender name that will appear in the email.

Sender e-mail address: Specify a custom Sender email address that should appear in the email.

Reply to e-mail address: Specify a custom Reply-to email address if the user wants to reply via email.



Cronjob Settings

If Cronjobs sounds foreign to you, no fret. It's actually just a task scheduler on most linux / unix environment. Most, if not all Linux / UNIX hosting accounts comes with a cronjob service included. If your hosting provider does not provide a cronjob interface, it's best to start looking for another host.

Why do we need cronjobs?
Because processing emails are always slow. When there are hundreds of emails to be processed at a time, the server needs to contact the respective mail servers to deliver the mail. However, the process for each delivery might differ from time to time and this would result in higher bounce rate of users on your site.

Consider this scenario:

John posted a comment on an update which has 10,000 previous comments. To deliver 10,000 emails as soon as you post a comment would take more than an hour. Would you want your user's to wait?



Enable secure cronjob url: By enabling this setting, not everyone is allowed to access the cronjob URL. You will need to enter the cronjob key below.

NOTE! Please remember to set the key for the cronjob below.

Secure cronjob key: Set any key that will be used when accessing the cronjob. Only visitors with this key will be able to access the cronjob URL.

example: SECRETKEY97

NOTE! This key needs to be included in the cron URL in order for the cronjob to work.

Copy the cron url below: http://yoursite.com/index.php?option=com_easysocial&cron=true&phrase=SECRETKEY97 < your secret key here

Emails to process at a time: - By setting a very large value, the script might time out. The ideal value would be between 20 - 40 emails to process at a time.



URL Caching



Automatically purge cached URL: By enabling this feature, the URLs would automatically be purged whenever the cronjob is executed.

Purge interval: Specify the number of days before the URLs expire.