First steps after installing

A fresh install works, but it is empty and its defaults are conservative. Do the steps below in order.

Everything below lives in the admin panel at https://example.com/oc-admin/.

1. Site details

Settings → General.

Set the site title, contact e-mail and default language. The title appears in page titles, in e-mail and in the browser tab. Get it right before search engines see the site.

2. Locations

Listings → Locations, or php oc-cli.php location:update --country=IN.

Visitors filter listings by place. Without location data, they cannot. Install the countries you serve. See installing location data.

3. Categories

Categories.

The default category tree is a starting point, not an answer. Disable what you will not use and rename the rest to the words your visitors use. Do this now: every listing belongs to one category, so the tree is hard to change once listings exist.

See categories.

4. Cron

Add one crontab entry:

*/5 * * * * php /path/to/site/oc-cli.php cron >/dev/null 2>&1

Without it, e-mail alerts never send and expired listings never expire. This is the step people skip most, and the bug they report most. See setting up cron.

5. Mail

Settings → Mail server.

Account activation, password resets and alerts all need outgoing mail. PHP’s default mail() usually lands in spam on shared hosting, so set up real SMTP before you invite anyone. See mail server.

6. Spam defences

Settings → Spam and bots.

Turn on a CAPTCHA (Turnstile or reCAPTCHA) before the site is public. Bots find an open publish form within days of a site going live. See spam and abuse.

7. Listing rules

Listings → Settings.

Decide these before people start posting. Changing them later is visible to everyone:

Whether new listings from users are held for admin approval (Hold new listings for admin moderation), and whether users must validate their own listings before they go live (Users have to validate their listings), with a threshold after which a regular user stops needing to.
Whether publishing needs an account.
How many photos a listing may carry.
How long a user must wait between posts.
How much notice a seller gets before a listing expires (Warn about expiration).

Listing expiry itself is set per category: Expiration (days) on the category, with an option to apply it to all subcategories. See categories.

8. Permalinks

Settings → Permalinks.

Turn on friendly URLs and confirm a listing page loads. Do this on day one: changing URL structure after search engines have indexed your pages means redirects and lost rankings.

See permalinks and SEO.

9. A theme

Appearance.

The bundled Storefront theme is a real theme, not a placeholder. Set your logo and colours before doing anything more ambitious. See themes and widgets.

10. Check your work

php oc-cli.php doctor

doctor checks the PHP version and extensions, the database, directory writability, whether cron has actually run recently, and the cache. It exits non-zero if anything fails.

Then post a listing yourself, from a logged-out browser, exactly as a visitor would. It is the fastest way to find the thing you forgot.