Setup your app

Remove the installer folder and the uploaded .zip before doing anything else — the installer should already refuse to run after installation, but don't leave either sitting on a public server.

The first time you visit your site, you'll see a blank homepage. That's expected — RamTV ships with no content or pages until you add them. This article is the whole path from that blank page to a real, running, monetized platform — what to do first, what can wait, and where the deeper guide for each step lives.

1. Log in and get oriented

Visit https://yourwebsite.com/admin/ and sign in with the email and password you set during installation. The left sidebar is organized into a few families you'll live in: Setting (everything about how the app behaves), Movies / TV (once installed), Users, Business (payments, subscriptions, ads) and Extensions (plugins, themes, tools).

2. Brand and core settings

These are worth doing before you add any content, because changing them later means redoing work:

• Settings → Interface → Brand — name, short name, icon and logo. Saving regenerates manifest.json, which is what lets browsers offer your site as an installable app
• Settings → Interface → Placeholders — a user-avatar and a cover placeholder. Content without its own poster/cover falls back to these
• Settings → Interface → Theme Setting — your brand color
• Settings → General → Currencies — if you're not pricing in USD, set this before you price anything
• Settings → Languages — if your primary language isn't English, add and set it before you start writing content. See Language

Two switches in api/app/config_user.php matter specifically while you're still building, not once you're live:

• production — leave it false during setup (lighter caching, more logs and errors surfaced); set it to true before you launch
• session_live — role changes don't reach already-open sessions immediately by default; set it to true while you're testing role changes, back to false before launch

RamTV caches aggressively on both server and client once production is true. Test in an incognito window or with your browser's cache disabled so you're not fighting your own browser's cache on top of RamTV's.

3. Choose your plugins

Movie is enabled by default — it's RamTV's flagship content type. Everything else is a plugin you turn on in Settings → Plugins. Installing or uninstalling upgrades the admin panel and client app automatically; just refresh both. See Managing plugins and Purchasing add-ons.

A rough guide to what's worth installing, and when:

4. Build your taxonomy, then add content

Every movie or episode needs its taxonomy — People, Companies, Genres, Countries, Languages, Tags — to exist first. Every picker for these, in both the admin panel and the upload wizard, is select-only: nothing can be created on the fly while you're editing a title. Build what you need on its own screen before you start.

1. Movies: with taxonomy in place, go to your Movies admin area, fill in cover/background art, title, storyline, release date and runtime, attach cast/crew and taxonomy, then add at least one Source (an upload or a YouTube id) — a title with no source doesn't play. Subtitles and a Collection are optional
2. TV shows: same taxonomy prerequisite, then create the Show, add a Season under it, then Episodes under that season — each episode gets its own Sources and Subtitles the same way

From there, there's more than one way to fill your catalogue:

• Admin CRUD or the uploader — enter titles by hand or let people submit them without the admin panel (uploads go live instantly, with no review queue — keep that in mind if you allow public uploads)
• Bulk Import — bring in an existing library in one pass
• Automation — schedule enrichment, ratings and subtitles from TMDB and other sources on a cron. See Automation for the exact cron command, every credential you'll need and where to get it
• AI generation — generate art, copy and metadata with Lorem AI

If your catalogue is empty and you just want real, playable content to design pages around while you set things up, the Movie: Free Sources tool auto-imports full films from a set of free-to-watch YouTube channels. Treat that as placeholder/evaluation content, not your final catalogue, unless you've checked the rights yourself.

5. Design your pages

Nothing is indexed automatically. Settings → Page Builder is how every page — home, browse, landing, everything — actually gets built: create a page, then fill it with widgets. Content widgets list and link your catalogue; installing Movie/TV adds their own. Design widgets (Call-to-action, Step List, Feature List) are what you use for hero sections, landing copy and layout. Uninstalling a plugin removes its widgets. Use Settings → Menu Builder for header/footer navigation. See Page Builder.

There's no demo to clone yet

Unlike RKHM, RamTV doesn't currently have a published public demo site or a one-click importer that clones one — so there's nothing to point you at yet, and we'd rather tell you that plainly than have you go looking for a button that isn't there. In the meantime, two things get you most of the way to a polished, demo-like result:

• Build your homepage and browse pages with the Design widgets above — this is literally what our own demo sites are built from elsewhere, just assembled by hand instead of imported
• Seed your catalogue with Movie: Free Sources (previous section) so you're designing around real, playable titles instead of empty placeholders

6. Users and roles

A role is what actually controls who can do what, in both the admin panel and the client app. There are two families: client-end roles (Guests, Users, and any premium tiers you create) and admin-area roles (Moderators, Admins). By default there are 4: Guests (not logged in), Users (logged in, default access), Moderators (limited admin access), and Admins (full access, can't be edited). RamTV has no seller/creator-payout model, so unlike RKHM there are no manager-type roles added by plugins here — every title comes from you, the operator.

Roles are assigned manually (Users → User List → edit a user) or automatically — buying a subscription plan is the main example on RamTV, covered next. Full detail in Roles.

7. Get paid

Enable at least one payment method under Business → Payment Gateways (Offline, PayPal, Stripe are built in; install Extra Gateways for more).

To sell subscriptions: go to Business → Subscription → Plan list, name the plan, set its price, write its perks as a checklist in the description (for example "SD streaming" vs. "4K + downloads"), and set a designated user-role. That role is granted automatically the moment someone buys the plan and removed automatically when it expires. Recurring billing is supported only through Stripe today.

RamTV also supports rentals — a normal purchase with an expiry instead of a second system, and it's active out of the box, not something you switch on. Configure it per role: edit a role, set its purchase type to permanent or rental, and give rentals a window in hours. If a user qualifies for more than one role, permanent access beats a rental, and the longest rental window wins. See Subscription system.

8. Monitor and maintain

A few things are worth checking regularly once you're live:

• Settings → Cronjob → Run logs — RamTV's automation needs a real OS-level cron calling api/admin.php?bof_cronjobs=yes on an interval, commonly once a minute. Nothing you scheduled runs until that's wired up server-side, and this page is how you confirm it's actually firing
• The Divar firewall plugin (install from Settings → Plugins) — real traffic/abuse stats and IP blocking if you want more visibility than your host provides
• Business → Transactions — financial activity
• Settings → Files → File List — keep an eye on storage usage, especially with video files

The admin dashboard's Statistics panel is a real, working analytics engine — see Statistics for exactly what each tab measures, how it collects and updates data, and its limitations. It complements rather than replaces your host's own uptime monitoring, and Google Analytics remains worth running alongside it for what it does not cover — see that article's own comparison. When you're ready to update to a new release, see Updating so you don't lose your own changes.

Quick reference: necessary now vs. safe to defer