Site settings apply to every page on one site. They control the site title, branding, shared markup and scripts, Google Analytics, the default menu and error page, currency display, and named variables that your custom components can read. A page or menu item belongs to one place in your site structure, while site settings affect the whole site at once.
If your account has more than one site, such as a member portal and a conference microsite, each site has its own site settings. Settings do not carry over between sites. For example, if a microsite needs a required HTML header, you need to add it there instead of expecting it to carry over from another site. See Choose the Site You Are Working On to understand how Rhythm knows which site's settings you are changing.
Because each site has its own settings, routing, and error pages, the same action can behave differently from one site to another. For example, signing out might show an unexpected error page on your event microsite even though it works cleanly on your member site. If you see that kind of difference, check that site's settings instead of assuming every site uses the same setup.
Saving Is Publishing
Pages and menus have a working copy that only staff can see, and then you publish them separately for visitors. Site settings do not work that way. When your save succeeds, Rhythm writes the change to the public location your portal uses, and visitors see it on their next page load. The settings screen does not remind you of this, so treat every save as a live change instead of a draft you can discard.
Warning
Saving site settings can add any script you enter to every page of your site at once. Review header and footer markup and script tags carefully before you save, because there is no preview step and no undo beyond saving another change.
Tip
After you add a script tag with inline content in the CSS & JavaScript area, the Save control is at the bottom of the page. Scroll down to find it if you don't see it right away.
What Happens Automatically on Every Page
Several site-wide behaviors come from your site settings without any extra work from you:
- A missing page goes to your chosen error page. If you select and publish a page as the site's error page, Rhythm sends visitors there when they reach an address that does not exist.
- A "Powered by Rhythm" line appears at the end of every page. No setting removes it from any site.
- Google Analytics records a page view on every page change, after you turn analytics on and enter a tracking identifier. Rhythm checks whether analytics is on once per browser session, so turning it on or off affects a visitor's next session, not the one already in progress.
- Currency amounts follow your account's own default display, unless the site's settings choose a different display. Rhythm checks your account's default once per session, so visitors see a change to that default in their next session.
What Happens When You Delete a Site
When you delete a site, Rhythm deletes that site's settings with it and leaves nothing behind. Nothing in site settings prevents the site from being deleted.
Site Settings and the Site Map
Your site's published pages find each other, and visitors find those pages, through an index called the site map. When you save site settings, Rhythm also updates the site map so it points to your newest saved settings, but only if the site already has a site map. See Rebuild a Site Map for how that index is built and kept current. On a brand-new site that has not had its first site map built yet, saving settings does not update the map. Your settings reach visitors only after that first build happens. If an update to the map fails partway through, Rhythm does not automatically retry it.
Site settings work differently from assets your pages link to, such as stylesheets, scripts, and files. Those assets use their own working-copy-and-publish process. See Working Copies, Published Versions, and the Asset Map Explained for how that process works and how it differs from the immediate-publish behavior described here.
A microsite's menu font and link colors are one example of styling that comes from design assets rather than a Site Settings control, so changing them may need design or development support. If you update the default assets used when creating new microsites, future microsites inherit that styling automatically.