Administration: Settings and configurations

You can modify the settings entirely through the Sitefinity CMS backend UI. All Sitefinity-specific settings are taken out of the project’s web.config file and put into separate configuration files in the App_Data/Sitefinity/Configurations folder. The web.config file includes only standard ASP.NET configurations. This means that Sitefinity CMS upgrades do not override client configuration settings.

• Basic settings
  To configure Sitefinity CMS settings, in the menu at the upper part of the screen, click Administration » Settings.
  The Basic Settings page appears. On this page, you can change in a user-friendly way the most commonly used settings, such as general settings, settings for comments and languages.
• Advanced settings
  If you need to configure settings other than those on Basic Settings page, click Advanced.
  The Settings page appears.
  The Settings page has the following structure:
  • Treeview with a list of all configuration sections.
  • Element section for editing configuration elements.
  • List of properties that could be configured in the backend.

If you are using Sitefinity CMS with multiple sites, you can configure the Basic settings in the following way:

• Settings set per site
  You can set basic setting for each individual site.
  These settings include:
  • Time zone
  • Social sharing
• Globally set settings
  All other settings, you can configure using the Global settings.
  All sites inherit the setting from the global settings.
  

  To open the global settings, on Basic Settings page, click link Global settings.

NOTE: If you want each site to have settings different from the ones inherited from the global settings, select the site, using the site selector in the upper-left part of the screen, click Administration » Settings » Break inheritance.

If you need to configure other settings, you must click Advanced link.
The Settings page appears.

The Settings page has the following structure:

• Treeview with a list of all configuration sections.
• Element section for editing configuration elements.
• List of properties that could be configured in the backend.

Configuration sections can have the following possible sources:

• Default
  The configurations are loaded with default values from the assemblies.
  
• Some default values are modified
  Modified values are persisted and loaded from the configuration files in the file system, the rest of the values are loaded from the assembly defaults. It does not matter if one, some, or all values have been changed. Only properties with modified default values are marked as Modified and their default values are displayed under their current ones.
• File system
  The configurations are loaded from the file system. The section has no default values and was created and exists only in a configuration file on the file system.
• Database
  The configurations are loaded from the database. The section has no default values and was created and exists only in the database in table sf_xml_config_items.

NOTE: When the Sitefinity CMS instance is running in Auto-storage mode with ReadOnlyConfig restriction level, you can modify or delete only settings that are persisted in the database.

Some backend activities require system restart. For example, after changing some settings or configurations, Sitefinity CMS automatically restarts your application.

Among the most common actions that evoke automatic system restart are:

• Adding new language
• Creating a new site when using multisite 
• Activating and deactivating modules from Modules & Services
• Creating a module using the Module builder
• Editing the web.config file