Getting started
The setup wizard
Open a fresh Timber and you land on Welcome to Timber. It takes under a minute.
The fields#
| Field | What it's for |
|---|---|
| Site title | Your site's name. Shows in the header, browser tab and emails. Change it any time in Design → Branding |
| Admin email | Your login, and where contact-form messages are sent |
| Admin password | With your email, this is your login to /padmin. 8+ characters; a long phrase beats a short clever password. Use Generate a strong password for a random one (it's copied to your clipboard — save it in your password manager) |
| Confirm password | Type it again |
| Add sample content | An About page, a privacy page, three posts and a Contact form to start from. Easy to delete |
| Allow search engines to index this site | Leave on for a live site. Switch off while you build; change it later in SEO & Metrics |
Before you can continue, the wizard checks your server (PHP version, writable folders, optional extensions) and lists anything to fix, with a hint for each.
What Timber creates#
When you press Get Started with Timber:
- Your settings (site, SEO, email, maintenance defaults).
- Header, footer and legal menus.
- Three starter sites — see below.
- If you left sample content on: an About page, a Privacy Policy page and three posts.
- A Contact form at
/contactand a privacy data-request form. - Your Administrator account (password stored as a hash). You're signed in and taken to the dashboard. Add editors and read-only users later under Users & roles.
The three starter sites#
Timber ships with three versions of your homepage, each on its own theme and full of placeholder copy:
| Version | Theme | Status | Character |
|---|---|---|---|
v0 Starter site | Birch | live | Calm, light, serif headlines — great for blogs and portfolios |
v1 Launch page | Ebony | private | Bold and dark with pricing, FAQ and testimonials |
v2 Studio | Ghost | private | Black and white, centred and editorial, in the spirit of WordPress's Twenty Twenty-Four |
Pages, posts, forms and menus are shared; each theme just renders them in its own style. Switch between designs in the Playground.
After the wizard#
Your dashboard greets you with a welcome panel and a launch checklist. Head to Your first hour.
Forgot your password?#
There's no email reset, but you can set a new password from the command line on the server — nothing else is touched:
php _dev/reset-password.php "a new long password"See Users & roles for the other options. (Don't delete files in data/ to "reset" — the installer would run again and overwrite your content.)