A quick tour of the XenForo Admin CP
Where everything lives in the XenForo Admin CP: options, add-ons, permissions, widgets, styles, tools and logs, and which sections you will use most.
Updated 3 min read By the D.C Style team
On this page
The Admin CP is where you run your forum. Open it at yourforum.com/admin.php and sign in with an administrator account. The menu on the left has ten sections, and once you know what lives in each one, finding any setting takes seconds. This guide walks through them in the order they appear.
The home page
The Admin CP home page links to every section and shows recent activity from your logs. Further down is the Server environment report, which lists your PHP and MySQL versions. It only shows for administrators with the "View server information" permission. That report is the quickest way to answer "which PHP do we run?" when an add-on needs a newer one.
The ten sections
| Section | What lives there |
|---|---|
| Setup | Options (every site-wide setting, grouped), public navigation, advertising, payment profiles, connected accounts and two-step verification. |
| Add-ons | Installing, upgrading, disabling and uninstalling add-ons. |
| Content | Smilies, attachments, tags, reactions and BB codes. |
| Forums | Nodes (your forums and categories), node permissions, thread prefixes and custom thread fields. |
| Communication | Notices, the activity summary email, and alerting or emailing members. |
| Users | Finding and editing members, batch updates, custom user fields, trophies and bans. |
| Groups & permissions | User groups, user group permissions, node permissions, Analyze permissions, moderators and administrators. |
| Appearance | Widgets, styles, style properties, templates, template modifications, languages and phrases. |
| Tools | Cron entries, the file health check, rebuild caches and data import. |
| Logs | The server error log, admin and moderator logs, spam logs and statistics. |
The pages you will use most
- Setup > Options is where most add-on settings live, each in its own group, such as "D.C Style - Thumbnail". Where to find an add-on's settings covers the exceptions.
- Groups & permissions > User group permissions decides who can use each feature. New permissions usually start switched off, so this is the first stop after installing an add-on. XenForo permissions explained.
- Appearance > Widgets places blocks such as statistics or thread lists on your pages. Add a widget and choose where it appears.
- Logs > Server error log holds the full details behind "Oops! We ran into some problems". How to read it.
- Tools > File health check finds files that are missing or were only partly uploaded. Using the file health check.
Some options are hidden until you ask for them
XenForo hides rarely used settings to keep the option pages short. When an option list has hidden entries, you will see "This list contains advanced options which may be hidden" with an Enable advanced mode link. On Setup > Options there is also a Show advanced options button. If a guide mentions a setting you cannot find, turn this on first.
Search instead of browsing
The search box at the top of the Admin CP looks through options, Admin CP pages, phrases, templates, style properties, users, user groups, nodes, widgets and more. Typing part of a setting's name is usually faster than remembering which group it is in.
Tip: Give staff their own administrator accounts with only the sections they need, rather than sharing one login. Our security checklist explains why.
Still stuck? Open a support ticket and tell us which page you are looking for. We will point you to it.