9 Comments Written by Cynthia on November 9, 2008 – 12:51 am

This is part of the osDate 7 part blog series. Scroll down to the bottom of this post for links to the other parts.

Here are some random tips that aren’t in any particular order. I will add more when I come up with new ones.

– You should protect your site as soon as possible by adding lines to your .htaccess file, which sits in your root directory. This is the htaccess thread on the forum that you need to read to make your changes. The explanations are also very helpful.

–  If you need to know only one link, it’s the TuFat osDate Forum. osDate has a very supportive, helpful community. You can read about many problems and solutions in the forum. If you can’t find an answer to your problem, post a topic and you’ll get a response within a day or 2. I suggest you do a “search” for your problem first; it’s very likely someone has had the same one in the past and had it solved already.

– If you want to change the text on your osDate website, 95% of it should be in the language file: language/lang_english/lang_main.php

– You should also create a blank index.html file and place it in your templates_c folder. You should also delete the files in there regularly, otherwise you may not see certain changes you’ve made on your site. Same goes for the cache folder.

– You need to also process your city/county/state and load zipcode files in Admin. They’re all under the “localities” heading.

– In Admin, click on “optimize tables” (near the end of the navigation menu) to improve the performance of your database.

* This concludes the osDate 7 part blog series. If there are any spelling errors, and anything that should be revised, let me know. I wrote this all in one afternoon with a few fruit breaks in between. Now it’s done and I can relax! Good luck.