A. There are two main areas where you can customise your site, both available from the "Quick" and "Main" menu displays.

Note that settings relating to an individual user are to be found by selecting "Users" from the menu display, clicking on the desired user and then the "edit" link. For convenience, you can access your own user settings directly by selecting "My details" from the menu display.

The site wide customisation pages are:

The Status page (select "Status" from the menu). This provides an overview of your account settings and gives you a selection of key options for configuring your site. In particular, you can choose a one of the pre-provided colour templates to change how your site looks and control whether the content you create is publically available. All of these options are available in greater detail in the Settings page.

The Settings page (select "Settings" from the menu) provides the full set of options for configuring your site. Related settings are organised into categories - each with it's own page. You can move through the differnt categories by clicking the [next] or [previous] buttons or by selecting a category by name and clicking the [go] button.

Note that none of the changes you make in any of the categories are applied to your site until you click the [Save all] button.

The settings categories are:

• Account info - here you can review the status of your account, upgrade or cancel your account. If you have a paid for account, you can also generate invoices for any payments you have made and manage your WorldPay details. This section also shows your personal details that you provided when you created your account. These details are only shown to you on this page and never used anywhere else on your site.
  
  
• General - this section contains a variety of settings that describe your site and control it's operation. In particular you can set which page of youe site is used as the "Home" or default page and enter text for the "slogan", "summary" and "keywords" that describe your site. These items are used to describe your site more fully, are potentially used by search engines, in generating RSS feeds from your site and (if you make your content public) in the site directory at openzpace.com.
  
  
• Page display - These settings allow you to configure the text that is show in the "title" area at the top of the screen, the items that should be shown in the "menu" bar (located below the "title" area), a special "welcome" message that is shown on your selected "Home" page, and a "footer" that is shown at the bottom of your pages. Here you can also configure how dates are displayed by your site.
  
  
• Page colours - The Page colour settings allow you to configure the textcolours, borders and background of all the major elements of your pages. Page colour settings are powerful but complex and we'll be making a full FAQ on this topic soon. In the mean time, a good way to start exploring is to apply one of the pre-provided templates - unlike in the Status page above where the template is applied directly, here the individual settings associated with the template are just loaded into this page. You can see their effects in the "preview" display and amend them before choosing to apply them by clicking the [Save all] button.
  
  
• Sidebar display - These settings control what is shown in the left and right sidebars on each page of your site. If you enable the left, right or both sidebars, any items you add to a given sidebar sidebar will be displayed but only if the person viewing the page is allowed to access the associated content. For example the "menu" sidebar item displays the "Quick menu". If you're logged in as the site owner, all items in the Quick menu will be shown. However, someone who hasn't logged in (an anonymous user) will only see items that are related to publicly available content - which of course may be none in which case the Quick menu is not shown at all.
  
  Note that if a sidebar has content that is available to a given user, they can toggle it's display on or off using the "show" and "hide" sidebar links at the far left and right of the menu bar.
  
  You can select the items in each sidebar using the choice lists. And more importantly you can completely configure the titles for each sidebar item, the content that is shown for it and create entirely new sidebar items using the "Sidebar content" editors. For example suppose you would like to have a new sidebar item containin a list of some of your favorite sites - simply edit the "New sidebar" item so that it's title is "My links" and then use the wysiwyg editing functions (or in html mode enter <a> links) to add a list of links (one on each new line) to the content section. Click [Save all] and the new "My links" sidebar item will be available in the left/right choice lists.
  
  You'll see from the provided set of sidebar items that they make extensive use of openZpace "smart-tags" these are special commands typically of the form [command:option1|option2|...] - when a smart-tag is displayed it is replaced with content generated as a result of the selected command and any options. A simple example being [ menu: ] which causes the "Quick menu" to be displayed. The full smart-tag reference guide is available here.
  
  
• Content display - This section provides various settings for how much content should be displayed per page and in what order it should be shown. Additionally you can choose to display the number of times an item of your content has been read and or it's "Hot" rating. The "Hot" rating is the average number of times an item has been read during a period you define. Put simply - hottness is a function of how much and how recently an item has been viewed. If an item has not been viewed for some time it cools until the point when it has not been viewed at all during the period you define and it's hot rating is zero.
  
  
• Content creation - Here you can set various default values that are applied when you create a new item of content such as a Journal or Photo - for example whether they should be made public or promoted to the site summary view (as well as being available in your journal or photo ablum). In setting these values, you might like to consider the following: when you're creating content using the web - you can of course change these default values then and there. However, if you're submitting content via email or MMS these default settings will apply to the new items created (until you chose to amend them at some later point).
  
  
• News feeds - This section is all about how you make the content of your site available to the world and these settings will only apply if you have content that you make available to anonymous users. There are two key features - "RSS feeds" and if your account type supports them - "Pings".
  
  An RSS feed is at heart a structured way of describing the items of content on a particular page of your site (such as - the site summary, your personal journal or all items in a given topic). As well a as giving a summary of the item, the RSS feed contains a web link back to the original item on your site. A wide range of tools exist (including openZpace "News feeds") that will automatically check a collection of RSS feeds on a regular basis, examine the summary information for each item found and present the user with consolidated view of new or updated items (or indeed items which match some further criteria). The process of making an RSS feed available to the world is call "news syndication" and the process of assembling, selecting and consolidating items from several feeds is referred to as "news aggregation".
  
  Because (if your account supports this) your openZpace site allows multiple users (authors) and multiple topics, there are potentially several ways of syndicating your content (eg: My journals in the Sports topic) the RSS settings in this section enable you to configure which of these are enabled. Note that when a feed is active the icon will be shown in the page menu bar of the associated view.
  
  While syndication makes your content available to the world, by itself, it doesn't tell people when new or updated content is available. Aggregators overcome this by checking feeds regularly and seeing if the content of a feed has changed. This is quite inefficient - if you want to know about changes soon after they occur, you need to check for changes frequently and for much of the time there may simply be no change. Checking less frequently of course means a greater delay in discovering any changes.
  
  The Pings technique helps to address this problem. There are a wide range of sites that maintain directories of websites and RSS feeds and provide the facility for content authors to register (against their entry in the directory) when changes occur. Put simply, when changes are made to content, a special "ping" message is sent to the directory indicating that a change has been made.
  
  If your account supports this feature, you can enable your openZpace site to ping a selection of the most popular website and RSS directories. As noted above, pings will only take place is you're syndicating your content and the content you are syndicating is publically available. www.masternewmedia.org has an excellent article on this and much more here.
  
  Lastly, even if your account does not support the Ping feature but you are syndicating publically available content, we will include you in the openZpace site directory at openzpace.com. In addition to a link to your site, we'll show your site name, slogan and description and the date of your last update. Note that the site directory always shows the most recently updated sites first and that when people seach the directory, in addition to your site name, slogan and description, your site will be also be found if there are matching keywords.
  
  
• Messaging - Here you can configure your catchall mailbox (user for mail to unknown users at your site) and your multimedia mailbox that handles content that is posted to the site by email or MMS. You can also setup your account to send SMS messages via our partner www.sms2email.com and if your account support this configure your site wide settings for spam and virus scanning.
  
  
• Message templates - In this section you can customise the standard messages that are sent by mail or text when an alert occurs, when a mobile number is verified or when you create a new user.
  
  
• Permissions - Here you can configure the features of your site and types of content that are available to site members and anonymous users.
  
  
• Access control - If your account supports this, the Access control section allows you to create additional rules that govern how users can access you site based on the IP addresses from a connection to your site is made.