Make Your Community Truly Yours! – Changing Default Settings

So you want to start your own social network! That’s a fantastic idea! You’ve read all the blog posts and the book on The Secrets of Successful Online Communities (haven’t read the book yet? You can get it for free by subscribing to our newsletter, look for it on the right). You’ve found your niche. You’ve installed PeepSo.

Now You’re Ready To Get Started

Begin by branding PeepSo to reflect your community. Change a few settings in PeepSo, and your community will scream ‘Star Wars Force Fighters’ or ‘Star Trek Vulcan Community’ or ‘Garden Owners United’ or whatever topic you and your users love.

Branding Settings

Email Settings

Three fields in the email notifications will tell members that they’re in a community for people like them:

• Email sender
• Admin email
• Copyright text

The email sender is the name that will appear in the inbox. The admin email is the email address from which the notification will be sent.

Emails Content

You can also change the content in the email notification. PeepSo has seventeen different email notifications, including those from additional PeepSo plugins.

• New User Email
• New User Email (No Account Verification)
• Registration
• Recover Password
• Password Changed
• New User Registration
• Account Approved
• Activity Notice
• Like Post
• User Comment
• Wall Post
• Welcome Message
• Like Profile
• Friend Request Received
• Friend Request Accepted
• New Message
• User Tagged

A community for Star Wars fans, for example, could sign its emails ‘May the Force be with you.’ A Star Trek fan community could opt for ‘Live long and prosper.’ A gardening community could use ‘Fertilize and grow’. Or not.

Landing Page

The landing page contains three options for text customization:

• Callout Header
• Callout Text
• Button Text

The default options will suit most communities but you might want to customize the text to more closely reflect your community.

Community Type

If you have the FriendSo plugins installed you can create an ‘open’ community. Every member will be able to see every post set to ‘public’ as well as the privacy settings of site members.

You can also create a friends-driven community. The privacy settings of site members and all posts that are set to ‘public’ will only be seen by users who are friends.

A Bit Of styling

The Appearance tab in the PeepSo config also allows for a few styling choices. You can create avatars that are square or round, themes that are dark or light, and use many more options.

Conclusion

Those settings give you plenty of power and a great opportunity to change the way your community looks. It won’t take you long and will have a huge effect on your community’s branding.

Questions? Comments?

Please leave them below.

Brought to you by Eric Tracz

I'm a Digital Nomad currently living in Manila, The Philippines. Co-Founder and CEO of PeepSo.com. First time WordCamp Speaker at WordCamp Kuala Lumpur 2017, WordCamp Singapore 2019 and hoping to speak more soon. I started my journey with open source nearly a decade ago as a simple support guy. Joomla! was my first encounter with the world of Open Source. After that period of my life got phased out I fell in love with WordPress and never left. I have been both lucky and at the same time I worked my ass off to get to where I am right now. Free time, if I have any, is usually spent with my wife and / or travel around South-East Asia. Even when I'm supposed to be on a little vacation, not a day goes by when I don't check up on PeepSo. So far visited or lived in: Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Hungary, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, China, Japan, Maldives, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Norway, Germany, Scotland, England and more... Whenever possible, I jump on my Ducati Monster and just ride.