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Newest 10 Entries

Question What is the role of robots.txt in SEO?
Answer The robots.txt file provides instructions to search engine crawlers about which parts of your website they should and should not access. You can customize the robots.txt file to prevent sensitive content from being indexed or to guide crawlers toward the most important areas of your site.
Question What is SEO and why is it important for my Composr website?
Answer SEO is the practice of optimizing your website to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). By improving your SEO, you increase the visibility of your website, driving more organic (non-paid) traffic to your content.
Question How can I edit the metadata in Composr?
Answer Composr provides several ways to customize your metadata:
  • Site-wide Settings: You can configure default metadata for your entire site in the Admin Zone under Setup > Configuration > Site options.
  • Content-Specific Settings: When adding or editing content like Comcode pages or news posts, Composr provides fields for customizing titles, descriptions, and keywords specific to that content under the "Metadata" section.
  • Automatic Detection: Composr can automatically generate metadata by analyzing your content, but it's generally recommended to refine these suggestions manually for best results.
Question Should I trust agencies that promise top search engine results?
Answer No; be wary of agencies guaranteeing top rankings for any desired keyword. Achieving top results for competitive terms requires significant effort, expertise, and often, an ongoing strategy.

Focus on agencies that prioritize ethical "white-hat" SEO techniques like creating valuable content, optimizing website structure, and building natural backlinks. Avoid those employing "black-hat" methods that can lead to penalties from search engines.
Question What are URL Monikers and how do they benefit SEO?
Answer URL Monikers replace generic numerical IDs in your URLs with descriptive keywords derived from your content titles.

For example, instead of yoursite.com/page.php?id=123, you can have yoursite.com/about-us. This makes your URLs more user-friendly and helps search engines understand the topic of each page, improving your search ranking.

You can set monikers in the "Metadata" section when adding / editing content.
Question What is an XML Sitemap and why is it important?
Answer An XML Sitemap is a file that lists all the pages on your website, helping search engines understand your site's structure and content. Composr automatically generates a comprehensive sitemap, including forum topics if you are using Conversr.

Ensure your system scheduler is enabled for automatic sitemap submission to search engines. You can also manually generate and submit the sitemap if necessary.
Question How can I improve my website's ranking in search engines?
Answer Composr offers various features and best practices to enhance your SEO:
  • Content Optimization: Write high-quality, keyword-rich content using clear headings, relevant links, and descriptive image alt text.
  • URL Monikers: Enable this feature to create human-readable URLs that incorporate keywords instead of numerical IDs.
  • XML Sitemaps: Composr automatically generates and submits XML Sitemaps to major search engines, aiding them in discovering and indexing your content.
  • robots.txt: This file allows you to control which parts of your site search engines can access and index. Composr provides a default robots.txt that can be customized as needed.
Question What are the primary metadata elements I should focus on?
Answer While Composr provides extensive metadata options, the key elements to prioritize are:
  • Title: The title tag appears in browser tabs, search results, and when your page is shared. It should be concise, descriptive, and include relevant keywords.
  • Meta Description: This short summary entices users to click on your search result. It should be engaging, informative, and accurately reflect the page's content.
  • Open Graph data: These protocols control how your content appears when shared on social media and other websites. They utilize elements like title, description, and images to create visually appealing previews.
  • Favicon and Apple Web Clip image: These small icons represent your website in bookmarks, browser tabs, and on mobile home screens. They contribute to branding and visual recognition.
Question What is metadata and why is it important for my website?
Answer Metadata is information about your web pages that isn't directly visible to visitors, but is used by search engines and social media platforms to understand and categorize your content.

Well-crafted metadata helps search engines properly index your site, making it more likely to appear in relevant search results. It also improves how your website appears when shared on social media, encouraging clicks and engagement.
Question What should I do about offensive or off-topic discussions?
Answer Decide on your moderation approach: balancing viewpoints, adhering to community standards, or focusing on topic relevance. Be prepared to face criticism regardless of your decisions. Establish clear rules and policies to guide user behavior.

Top 10 Entries

Title Warnings / Moderation
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Description

(Conversr Only)

Issue warnings (with an optional Private Topic sent to them) for unruly members. Optionally include one or more of several punitive actions as explained below.

Ban the member's IP address so they can no longer access the site from that device (this also adds their IP address in your htaccess file)

Ban the member so they can no longer log in (and their profile can no longer be viewed by others except high-ranking staff)

Report spammers to public blocklists such as Stop Forum Spam

Put members in a special restricted 'probation' usergroup for a specified number of days

Silence a member from the forum or topic on which they made their problematic post (this also works on comments).

Change a member's usergroup (useful to de-rank them)

Automatically delete recent or violating content / posts posted by the member

Charge points from the member's balance (also affects rank points to penalise their ability to rank up)

Reverse recent point transactions members made in abuse

Save and load explanatory messages for future use

Automatically generate punitive action text in the Private Topic sent to the member

Members can view their account standing on their profile, including any active punitive actions and their warnings history

Staff can view full details of individual warnings including an action log and options to undo some of the individual punitive actions

Develop your own cns_warnings hooks to define additional punitive actions that can be used with the warnings system

Use one of the several pre-defined "reasons" for a warning in the dropdown to include the warning in your site statistics (for number of warnings issued by reason).

Title Spam Protection
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Configurable word filters

Investigation: Investigate activity by member ID, username, IP address, or e-mail. Ban troublesome IP addresses.

CAPTCHA: Include CAPTCHA on forms for guests and new members. Enable CSS and/or JavaScript CAPTCHA to make detection by bots much harder. Enable an audio version for the visually impaired.

Integrate with known-spammer blacklists: Multiple configurable levels of enforcement.

Honeypots and blackholes: Find and ban bots via automated traps that humans would never see or fill out.

Heuristics: Clever ways to detect and block spammers based on behaviour.

Published e-mail addresses will be protected from spammers

Protection from spammers trying to use your website for their own SEO

Title Template Programming Language
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Description

Also known as Tempcode.

Perform computations: Run loops, manipulate logic, numbers, and text.

Handy effects: Easily create design effects like “Zebra striping” and tooltips – and much more.

Branching and filtering: Tailor output according to permissions and usergroups, as well as user options such as language selection.

Include other templates, blocks, or pages, within a template

Create and use standard boxes: Avoid having to copy and paste complex segments of XHTML5.

Easy web browser sniffing: Present different markup to different web browsers, detect whether JavaScript is enabled, detect bots, and detect PDAs/Smartphones.

Randomisation features

Pull up member details with ease: For example, show the current users avatar or point count.

Easily pull different banner rotations into your templates

Escaping: Easily escape parameters and strings to avoid JavaScript or HTML syntax errors and XSS vulnerabilities.

Create your own Tempcode symbols through hooks

Title Testing tools
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Switch users: Masquerade as any user using your admin login

Change theme images inline with just a few clicks

Easily find and edit the templates used to construct any screen

Error monitoring: Get informed by e-mail if errors happen on your site.

Make inline changes to content titles

Easy text changes: Easily change the language strings used to build up any screen.

Easily diagnose permission configuration problems: Log permission checks, or interactively display them in Firefox.

Testing platform: Use our testing_platform non-bundled addon when developing with Composr to ensure nothing has been broken.

Profiler: Use the documented profiling tool to monitor intensive logic and their time / memory consumption.

Health check: Use the bundled health check to routinely run site checks and report any issues or failures detected.

Title Rich Media
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Comcode: Powerful but simple content-enrichment language.

Media embedding: Easily integrate/attach common video and image formats, as well as embeds for common sites such as YouTube (just by pasting in the URL).

Easily create cool effects: Create scrolling, rolling, randomisation, and hiding effects. Put content in boxes, split content across subpages. Create XHTML5 overlays. Place tooltips.

Customise your content for different usergroups

Create count-downs and hit counters

Automatic table of contents creation for your documents

Custom Comcode tags: Set up your own tags, to make it easy to maintain a sophisticated and consistent design as your site grows.

Embed pages within other pages

Title Design without barriers
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Full control of your vision: Control hundreds of settings. Strip Composr down. Reshape features as needed.

Full templating support: Reskin features to look however you want them to.

No navigation assumptions: Replace default page and structures as required.

No layout assumptions: Shift content between templates, totally breaking down any default layout assumptions.

Embed content entries of any type on your pages

Title Themeing tools
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Theme Wizard: Recolour your CSS and theme images in just a few clicks (Composr picks the perfect complementary palette and automatically makes 100's of CSS and image changes)

Logo Wizard: Generate a basic logo for use on your site

Built-in template and CSS editing tools

Interactive CSS editor: Quickly identify what to change and preview.

Title Administration Zone
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Dashboard: View a checklist of things that need done, software upgrade information, latest Composr news, posts in the staff forum, staff notes, useful links, and more.

Audit: View logs and statistics of just about anything with the site and Composr system.

Site statistics: View comprehensive graphs and statistics across a wide range of metrics. Set your own KPIs and get notified when they are reached.

Security: Control site access (including IP bans), privileges, members / usergroups, and word filters.

Structure: Manage and upgrade addons, define zones, configure chatrooms and forums, manage menus, create redirects, and edit the sitemap.

Style: Whitelist the software, manage emoticons, manage themes / run the theme wizard, run the logo wizard, and translate / rephrase the software.

Setup: Set a wide variety of options for your site depending on what addons you have installed.

Tools: Run full or incremental backups, scan for broken URLs, clear the cache or run optimisation tools, edit the code, run Commandr, run the upgrader, run health checks, import content from another site, make and send newsletters, run server checks and view PHP info, run privacy purging or downloading, send an e-mail through the software, and view Composr contributors

Content: Manage all of your content for your site

Help: Search across the site or the tutorials for something

Conflict detection: Detect when multiple staff are trying to change the same thing at the same time.

Examine action logs: See exactly who has done what and when

Commandr: Optional use of a powerful command-line environment (for Unix geeks). Use unix-like tools to explore and manage your database as it if was a filesystem, and perform general maintenance tasks.

Aggregate content types: Design complex content relationships, cloning out large structures in a single operation.

Content versioning: See revisions of certain content

Title Website Polls
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Integrate polls into your website: Gauge visitor opinion.

Community involvement: Users can submit polls and comment and rate them.

Multiple polls: Showcase different polls on different areas of your website.

Archive the data from unlimited polls

Title Community features
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Description

User content submission: Allow users to submit to any area of your site. Optionally enable validation so staff must approve the content before it goes live.

Public awards: Give public awards to your choice of “best content”

Per-usergroup privileges: Give special members access to extra features, like file storage

Recommend: Visitors can recommend your website or a page to other visitors. Control who can specify their own custom message and those who must use the default (spam prevention).

Members can report content to you for review via "Report This" links (which creates a Support Ticket with a copy of the content at the time of reporting). You can also turn validation off for content to hide it after a certain number of reports.