This section describes the S2 engine's control panel interface.

An S2-powered website consists of public pages and a password-protected control panel.

To access the control panel, enter your login credentials at <site address>/_admin/. There's also a handy shortcut for editing any page: simply append three hyphens (---) to the page's URL and navigate to the new address.

The control panel contains several tabs. Before exploring them in detail, it's recommended to read about S2's capabilities. That section explains the core concepts behind S2, while this documentation focuses on practical usage.

This tab allows you to:

• Edit pages
• Manage comments
• Create new elements
• Delete unnecessary elements
• Modify the website structure via drag-and-drop

See also:
Hierarchical website structure

This is a list of all the website pages in a single-level table view. It's useful for searching and filtering pages.

This screen lets you edit the following page components and properties:

• Title
• Meta tags (keywords and description)
• Excerpt
• Tags
• HTML content of the page
• Author
• Template
• Creation and modification date and time
• Slug

Page content is expected to contain HTML markup. The toolbar buttons (above the text field) and keyboard shortcuts help insert commonly used tags. When you click the image insertion button, a pop-up window with the image manager appears. The selected image is inserted at the current cursor position in the text.

The preview area next to the source text shows how it will appear on the website. The preview content is generated from the site.php template by replacing the <!-- s2_title --> and <!-- s2_text --> placeholders with the corresponding editor fields.

The last button activates “smart” paragraph and line break formatting: <br /> tags are added before line breaks, and text blocks separated by empty lines are wrapped in <p></p> tags.

The modification timestamp is used by S2's core for RSS feed generation (e.g., after fixing a typo in an excerpt, you can update the modification time rather than the creation time). Pages with empty “Created” and “Modified” fields won't appear in RSS feeds or in the <!-- s2_last_articles --> placeholder. The “now” links quickly insert the server's current time.

To publish a page, check the “Published” checkbox. Uncheck “Allow comments” to hide comments and the comment submission form. The “Favorite” adds a star icon to the page title. This icon is a link to the favorite pages list.

Press Ctrl+S to save the page.

See also:
Hierarchical website structure
SEO-friendly URLs
Excerpts
Search engine meta tags
Tags

The image manager supports basic file operations. You can:

• Upload files (including multiple file uploads and drag-and-drop from file explorers)
• View thumbnails of uploaded images
• Create subfolders in the images directory (default: _pictures; PHP safe mode may cause issues with uploads to manager-created subfolders)
• Rename files and folders via double-click
• Move files and subfolders (drag-and-drop supported)
• Delete files and folders using the Delete key

This tab enables you to:

• Hide visible comments or unhide hidden ones
• Mark good comments
• Edit comments
• Permanently delete comments

See also:
Comments

The comment submission and editing forms have the same fields.

This tab lets you add, edit, and delete tags.

The slug and tag description are used for public pages displaying excerpts of all related pages.

Displays site and server information.

Clicking the “PHP: ...” link opens a new window with detailed PHP configuration (phpinfo).

All parameters on this tab have detailed explanations.

Available styles and language packs lists are generated from the _styles and _lang directories.

This section allows you to:

• Create new users
• Manage user permissions (access levels are explained in the table header hints; “View secret data” refers to viewing commenter emails/IPs, site settings, etc.)
• Specify usernames (displayable via the <!-- s2_author --> placeholder)
• Set user email addresses (receives comments if the “Moderator” permission is enabled)
• Change user passwords
• Delete users

See also:
User accounts

The first section lists extensions available for installation or update, generated from the _extensions directory. The second section shows installed extensions.

Warning: Uninstalling an extension typically permanently deletes its collected data. Only remove extensions if absolutely necessary—disabling them preserves data.

After installing, disabling, or removing extensions that modify control panel functionality, you may need to reload the panel.

See also:
Extensions
Extension development

Displays information about logged-in users, including IP addresses, user agents, and last action times. Also you can delete sessions to log out users.