Answers to frequently asked questions regarding Elxis CMS usage.

Elxis is an open source content management system (CMS) written in PHP programming language. It was born on December 2005 and since then it is used by thousands of people in all over the world. Elxis is famous for its stability and security, for the well tested extensions, for the multi-lingual features and the unique ideas we have implemented in it through these years many of which copied by other CMSs later.

What can I do with Elxis?

With Elxis you can easily build small, medium or large scale web sites without the need of having programming skills (although basic knowledge of HTML/CSS is recommended for best results). You can create news portals, personal blogs, online magazines, business sites, online shops, community portals and more.

What do I need to use Elxis?

Except Elxis, you will need some place to host your site online (although you can install Elxis in your local computer too). Your hosting provider should provide you a web server such as Apache, lighttpd or nginx, able to run PHP scripts and a database such as MySQL or PostgreSQL. We recommend you to pick Linux as the web server operating system. Any Linux distribution is fine. For business web sites we strongly recommend new users to assign the build of their web site to a highly trained professional. You will save time and get the best result.

Who owns Elxis?

Elxis is been developed by the Elxis Team, a group of friends pashioned with the open source software. There are no big companies behind Elxis, there are no sponsors, advertizers, or hidden financial interests. Elxis is independent, a pure open source project. For legal purposes Elxis is represented by Ioannis Sannos, the core developer of Elxis, located in Athens, Greece.

The Elxis license

Elxis is released for free under the Elxis Public License (EPL), an open license quite similar to the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported (CC BY-ND 3.0) license. In short EPL grands you or limits you the following permissions.

• You can use Elxis for any web site you want, even commercial ones.
• You are allowed to provide paid services and extensions for Elxis (custom development, web hosting, support, templates, training, etc).
• You are not allowed to sell Elxis.
• You are not allowed to re-brand or rename Elxis.
• You are not allowed to modify or remove the Elxis copyright notes.
• You can create extensions for Elxis of any license. These extensions should be installed after the initial Elxis installation. You can not include them into the official Elxis package even if they are free ones (you are not allowed to re-pack Elxis).
• Elxis Team is not responsible for any damages may occur to your web site such as data or money loss by the use of Elxis.
• You can share and re-distribute only original copies of Elxis as released by elxis.org website.
• You can modify Elxis only for your own web site.
• You are not allowed to publish or distribute modified versions of Elxis (forks are not allowed).
• Improvements, fixes and new ideas should be send to the Elxis Team for implementation in the official release.
• Elxis copyright holder is Elxis Team having legal representative Ioannis Sannos.

Elxis is a modern powerful content management system having many cool features. Some of them are really unique. We advise you to take your time and explore Elxis. Every day you use Elxis you will discover new ways to do things faster and easier. It is impossible to list all the things you can do with Elxis and even more provide a detailed how-to guide for all of them. In this article we provide answers to most frequently questions people ask us. For anything else please visit the Elxis forums or the online documentation for support.

How do I set the site front-page?

You set the site front-page from Elxis configuration by providing the Elxis URI to the page you want to be shown in front-page. By default this is the root of component content (content:/). Component content has a special feature that allows you to generate complex grid layouts for the front-page. On each cell of this grid you can display any number of Elxis modules.

Does Elxis support sub-categories?

Yes, Elxis supports sub-categories of any level. For SEO reasons and easy of access we suggest you to create sub-categories up to the second or third level.

I need a second, or more, site on the same domain. Do I have to re-install Elxis?

No, you don't. With the Elxis multi-sites feature you can have an unlimited number of sub-sites under one mother site. These sites share the same filesystem but have different configuration, data, template, users, etc, making them independent. Although the sites are independent they still share the same filesystem. The Elxis Team recommendation is that the administrators of these sub-sites should be trustful to the admin of the mother site.

How do I configure a page?

Till Elxis 2009.x generation the layout and features of a page was controlled by the menu item that linked to that page. This system confused new users and many times lead to issues such as error 404. Since Elxis 4.x this has changed. The layout and features of a page is now controlled by the page it self. Each category or article has a set of parameters were you can set options such as the show of article author, hits, print links, if you allow comments, etc. You can also set global options, per category options and per article options. Specific element options overwrite the more generic ones. For instance you may allow comments for all articles in a category but disable commentary for an individual article.

How do I create a blog?

Elxis content categories and articles are multi-functional. You don't need a special blog component to have a blog. A standard category can act as a blog by setting it's articles to be listed in a blog style. You can also make use of tags, comments, share and social buttons and anything else a blog should have.

I concern about security. How does Elxis goes with it?

In the Elxis world security is the first priority. Elxis is shipped with an attack detection and protection system called Elxis Defender. Among others, Elxis Defender can block bad requests to your site, detect file system changes and send alert notifications to the site's technical manager. There are many other security related features like the Security Level configuration option, the automatic SSL/TLS switch, the usage of the PHP's native PDO library for handling the database which makes impossible SQL injection, the security images (captcha) and the XSS prevention system for the forms, the double authentication check for the administration area, the tight user access system, the in-accessible from the web Elxis repository (including session storage), the session encryption and much more.

Where the administrator folder went?

There is no administrator folder in Elxis any more! There is a folder named estia containing a file that initiates the administration user requests but nothing more. Note that you can rename that folder to anything you want.

Can I have content in multiple languages?

Yes, Elxis has full multilingual support. Each element (article, category, etc) is initially entered in the site's main language. You can after add to the elements unlimited number of translations in different languages.

Can people login without registering?

Yes, Elxis supports external authentication methods such as Twitter, Gmail, OpenId, Yahoo and LDAP which make possible logging in with your account in any of the supported authentication providers.