Your first site

Settings

site.yaml holds your site's name, address, menus and more. Here are the settings to change first, one by one.

Open site.yaml in your text editor. It's written in YAML: one setting per line, name: value. Lines starting with # are notes, and don't do anything.

The top of site.yaml: name, url, language, description, author, copyright, credit, timezone, paginate and collections

Be careful with spaces. In YAML, the spaces at the start of a line matter: they show what belongs to what. Keep the same indentation as the lines around the one you change, and use spaces, not tabs.

The first five to change

name: your site's name, shown in the header and in browser tabs.

name: Bakery on Main

url: the address your site will have when it's published, starting with https://. HotDog uses it for links in feeds, sitemaps and link previews. Don't worry if you don't have one yet; change it when you do.

url: https://bakeryonmain.example

description: one sentence about the site, shown in search results for pages that don't have their own summary.

author: you, or your organization.

language: the language your site is written in, as a short code: en for English, es for Spanish, de for German, fr for French.

copyright: Bakery on Main LLC
copyright_url: https://bakeryonmain.example/
credit: true
  • copyright is the name in the footer's © line (your site's name if you leave it out). copyright_url makes it a link.
  • credit: true shows "Built with HotDog CMS" in the footer. Set it to false to remove it.

Your time zone

If your site will have events, banners that come down at a set time, or pages that go live later, tell HotDog where you are:

timezone: America/Chicago

Use the name from the list of time zones, like Europe/London or Australia/Sydney.

The menus setting lists the links in the header (main) and the footer (footer):

menus:
  main:
    - { name: Home, url: / }
    - { name: Articles, url: /articles/ }
    - { name: About, url: /about/ }
    - { name: Contact, url: /contact/ }

Menus and links has the details.

After a change

Save the file. If hotdog-cms serve is running, it rebuilds and the browser reloads. If you made a mistake in the YAML, the terminal says which line, and the site keeps showing the last good version until you fix it.

Every setting is listed in the site.yaml reference.