Community settings

Under Dashboard → Community you find the settings that apply to the whole community rather than to a single piece of content. This page covers five of them: Time zone, Navigation, Search listing, Redirects and Export.

Two more tabs have their own chapters: Members is described under Members & roles, Plan under Billing.

Your community’s time zone

On the General tab you pick your community’s home time zone. It answers a question nobody thinks to ask — and one that can shift an event by hours: whose time does a typed clock time mean?

• Without a zone set, creating an event uses the time zone of whatever device is doing the typing. If someone on holiday in Hawaii schedules the Hamburg meetup for “19:00”, that means 19:00 Hawaii time — in Hamburg the event would sit at 7 in the morning.
• With a zone set, typed times always mean the community’s time, no matter where a team member happens to be. Recurring events also stay on the same wall clock across daylight-saving changes: the weekly 20:00 event stays at 20:00.

Everyone still sees the event in their own time — the one from their account time zone. In short: planned in the community’s zone, read in yours.

An event somewhere else

If an in-person event recognisably takes place in another country, the event form suggests the matching time zone as soon as you type the address: “The address points to Japan. Plan the time in Asia/Tokyo?” One click applies the zone to this one event — the time you typed stays as it is and now means local time. A second click takes you back to the community’s zone.

Putting the menu together

The Navigation tab decides what appears in your community's menu, in which order and under which name.

Your own links come in two kinds: a page of this community (from the list of your published pages) or an external address. External addresses have to start with https:// and open in a new tab.

To the right there is a preview in the order visitors will see. Entries beyond the fifth move into a "More" menu — a menu that grows off the screen helps nobody.

Three things that deliberately do not work:

• Renaming yes, redirecting no. A built-in entry always keeps its target. If "Posts" suddenly led somewhere else, the menu would be a trap — for your own target, add your own link.
• What your plan does not include stays hidden — even if you show it. Your choice is still saved and takes effect as soon as the product is available.
• No rebuilding of addresses. The menu changes the label, not the path. What old paths are for is covered under redirects below.

Reset to the default menu restores the shipped state in one step.

Search listing

The Search listing tab decides how your community shows up in search engines — and whether it should show up at all.

The description

The field Description of your home page is the text that appears below the title in a search result. One or two sentences: what is this about?

• Up to 160 characters are recommended; search engines usually cut off beyond that. The counter under the field keeps track, and the hard maximum is 320.
• Empty does not mean "nothing": the first paragraph of your home page is used instead — exactly as before.
• Empty and no home page: the search result shows no description at all.

Keeping out of search engines

A switch asks search engines not to list the community in their results. Two things to know about it:

Preview

Below that you see both side by side:

1. In search — how your listing looks in a search result.
2. When a link is shared — the preview card that appears in messengers and social networks. It is generated automatically from your community's colour and name; uploading your own image is deliberately not offered here.

Redirects

When you rename or move a page, old links break. Under Redirects you say where they should lead instead.

A redirect consists of two entries:

What you can expect:

• Exactly this one address. There are no wildcards — every old address gets its own row. Up to 100 redirects are possible.
• The German version is caught as well. You enter the path once; the version under /de/… is covered too.
• For a target on this site the language is preserved — whoever was browsing in German lands on the German version.
• Query parameters travel along. Whatever follows the ? is not lost.
• A target on this site counts as a permanent move, a target on another site as a temporary one. That is why an internal move takes the old address's search standing with it, and an external one does not.

Two limits that Pukalani enforces when saving:

• No chains and no loops. A target must not itself appear as an old address in the list — otherwise visitors are redirected twice in a row, or it goes round in circles.
• Areas the platform needs for itself cannot be redirected: sign-in, administration, home page. Product paths such as /feed, on the other hand, can.

Export: taking everything with you

The Export tab downloads what is in this community as one single JSON file. Exporting changes nothing in your community, and it works even while the community is read-only because of an open payment: your content is never held hostage.

The export is limited to two downloads per minute. Anyone clicking faster reads a note and tries again a moment later.