Interface discovery
First steps
In addition to the global help pages, several administration pages have an online help. If javascript is enabled
on your browser, you can see online help at the upper-right position of the page, by clicking on the 
Need Help? link. If Javascript is disabled, the help is displayed at the bottom of the page.
Each administration page will display the same top heading, main menu and footer. (The order given here is what is shown on a computer screen. For mobile devices or tablets, it may vary according to the space available.)
Top heading
The top heading is composed of three elements:
Logo
By default, this logo is the Dotclear logo and links to the administration landing page. However, a platform manager can choose another logo and redirect towards something else (generally, the service landing page).
Blog(s)
The first element located after the logo shows the active blog, i.e. the blog on which you are acting. If your installation is composed of several blogs, these informations are available in a combo menu, which lets you switch to another blog.
The link following the blog name opens your current blog in another window or another tab.
User
The link My dashboard gets you back to the blog administration landing page.
The link My preferences leads to the page where you can modify your personal informations, setup the dashboard and choose your interface and editing options.
Surprisingly, the link Disconnect [your login] disconnects you from the administration of your blog (at Dotclear's, we are ergonomy champions!).
Main menu
The main menu is located on the left side of the screen. It can be collapsed by clicking on its right border (and then uncollapsed by clicking again on it).
It leads to the different administration pages, according to your permissions on the current blog. It is composed of four blocks:
- My favorites lists the pages that you have selected as favorites in the My preferences/My Dashboard tab. If you have not selected any favorite yet, this list will contain the default Dotclear set, or the set that has been defined by the platform manager. If you do not want to display this block, you can uncheck the matching checkbox in your dashboard options.
- Blog lists all the pages that enable to feed and setup the current blog, from editing an entry, managing media, choosing the blog appearance or other parameters.
If you do not have administrator rights on the current blog, there will be no other block below that one in the main menu. - System settings links to the pages that allow you to manage the Dotclear installation: blogs management, users and available languages, plugins installation, system settings. If you have rights on several blogs, but no superadministrator rights, you will only see the Blogs entry.
- Plugins enables you to setup the installed plugins. If the plugin settings only impact one blog at a time, its administration page is available from the Blog block, but if they impact the whole installation, they are located here, and only available for super-admin users.
Footer
A free version of Dotclear will be offered to any user who will discover the secret hidden in the footer.
Help for great beginners
If you are not familiar with blogs, we recommend that you have a look at our documentation (the whole table of contents is available in the Documentation tab of this page) as well as tutorials such as:
The Dotclear forum is a welcoming place where there is no such thing as a stupid question. Don't hesitate to participate if you need help and, why not, to help people in return.
We try our best to use a vocabulary that is easy to understand without specific knowledge. However, if we end up using a technical term, you will probably find its definition in the glossary of our online documentation.