Welcome to the NZRT Wiki Podcast. Today we’re looking at Admin Panel.

So, if you’re managing a Flarum forum, the Admin Panel is your control centre. You can get to it by navigating to your forum’s address and adding slash admin at the end. Keep in mind that you’ll need to be a member of the Admin group to get in — it’s not open to regular users.

Let’s walk through what you’ll find inside. There are nine main sections, and each one handles a different part of running your forum. First up is the Dashboard, which gives you a quick snapshot of your forum’s activity — things like how many discussions exist, how many posts have been made, your total user count, and how many users are currently active. Think of it as your at-a-glance health check.

Next is Basics. This is where you set the foundational identity of your forum — the title, the description, a welcome banner for new visitors, your default language, and your default theme. If someone lands on your forum for the first time, Basics is what shapes that first impression.

Then there’s Mail, which we’ll come back to in a moment because there’s a bit more to cover there.

After Mail, you’ve got Users. This section lets you browse through your entire user base, edit individual profiles, change what group someone belongs to, suspend an account if needed, or delete a user entirely. It’s your main people-management hub.

Groups sits right alongside it. Here you can create new groups or edit existing ones, and you can assign each group its own colour and icon to make them visually distinct.

Permissions is where things get a bit more nuanced. You set per-group permissions here — so you’re deciding what each group of users can and can’t do on the forum. You can also set permission overrides at the tag level, which means certain tags on your forum can have different rules from the rest.

Appearance gives you control over the look and feel. You can choose a theme, add custom header or footer HTML, and write custom CSS if you want to go further than the built-in options allow.

Tags is where you manage your forum’s topic categories. You can create new tags, edit existing ones, reorder them, set colours and icons, and even nest tags inside each other to create a hierarchy.

And finally, Extensions. This is where you turn installed extensions on or off, and access their individual settings when they have them.

Now, back to Mail. Flarum uses email for three main purposes: verifying email addresses when someone signs up, handling password resets, and sending notification digests if you’ve got that enabled through an extension.

When it comes to how email actually gets sent, you have a few driver options. You can use SMTP, which is the most common setup for production environments. You can use PHP’s built-in mail function. There’s a log driver, which is great for development — instead of actually sending emails, it just writes them to a log file so you can inspect what would have been sent. And there are also drivers for Mailgun and Amazon SES if you’re using those services.

For a typical SMTP setup, here’s what you’re configuring. You’d set the driver to SMTP, then provide the hostname of your mail server, the port number — commonly 587 for TLS — and the encryption type. You’d then enter your username and password for the mail account, and set the from address, which is what recipients will see as the sender. Once you’ve filled all that in, you can send yourself a test email right from Admin, under the Mail section, to confirm everything’s working.

One thing worth knowing is that Flarum doesn’t have a built-in maintenance mode toggle. There’s no button you can flip to take the forum offline while you work on it. If you need to do that, your options are to temporarily rename or remove the main index file in the public folder on the server, or to set up a server-level redirect that sends visitors somewhere else while you work.

Now, if you’re comfortable working on the server directly, there are also some command-line tools available. You run these from the forum’s root directory on the server. There are four key ones to know about. The first clears all caches, which is useful after making config changes. The second republishes extension assets — things like stylesheets and scripts that extensions add to the front end. The third runs any pending database migrations, which you’d typically do after installing or updating an extension. And the fourth just prints out version and extension information, handy for quick diagnostics.

That covers the Admin Panel from top to bottom — from the dashboard overview and core settings, through mail configuration and user management, all the way to the command-line tools you might need when working server-side.

That’s it for this episode of the NZRT Wiki Podcast. Thanks for listening.