First steps after installing

A fresh install works, but it is empty and its defaults are conservative. This is the order worth doing things in, and why each one matters.

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, so it is worth getting right before search engines see the site.

2. Locations

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

A classifieds site without location data cannot filter by place, which is half of what makes it useful. Install the countries you actually serve — see installing location data.

3. Categories

Categories.

The default tree is a starting point, not an answer. Disable what you will not use and rename the rest to the words your visitors use. Category structure is hard to change once listings exist, because every listing belongs to one — so spend time here now rather than later.

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 most commonly skipped step and the most commonly reported bug. See setting up cron.

5. Mail

Settings → Mail server.

Account activation, password resets and alerts all depend on outgoing mail, and PHP’s default mail() on shared hosting usually lands in spam. Configure real SMTP before you invite anybody. See mail server.

6. Spam defences

Settings → Spam and bots.

Turn on a CAPTCHA — Turnstile or reCAPTCHA — before the site is public. A classifieds site with an open publish form is found by bots within days of going live. See spam and abuse.

7. Listing rules

Listings → Settings.

Decide the rules before people start posting, because changing them later is visible to everyone:

whether new listings are held for moderation, and after how many approved listings a user stops needing it
whether publishing requires 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

Listing expiry itself is 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. Doing this on day one matters: changing URL structure after you have indexed 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

It checks the PHP version and extensions, the database, directory writability, whether cron has actually run recently, and the cache — and 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.