The Power of ExpressionEngine CP Tabs
Mon, December 21, 2009 · 11:03 PM
As I develop sites with ExpressionEngine (EE), I’m always looking for ways to improve the clients experience with the control panel. Today, I’m going to talk about a recent strategy I’ve begun to use.
This technique requires a just one extension: Publisher’s Clearinghouse. It also utilizes the “New Tab” feature of EE.
In a nutshell, hide a single-entry-purposed weblog from the publish tab and create a separate tab for the one entry within that weblog you want replaced.
For this particular site, the client had a weblog to control the content on the sidebar of their blog. The weblog itself used FF Matrix and nGen File Field, so that they could add to existing content. Instead, of creating a new entry, they wanted to be able to see what was currently in the sidebar, so we decided to utilize one entry and edit it as necessary.
However, the first time the client went into the control panel, they saw “Blog Sidebar” under the publish menu and added a 2nd entry. This is where the extension comes in. You just select what weblogs you want hidden. In our case, we hid “Blog Sidebar”.
Next, I wanted the client to be able to edit the entry in the weblog easily (i.e. without going through the edit tab), so if you go to the edit screen for the particular entry and select “New Tab”, there is now a tab that links directly to the entry. You can rename the tab to whatever you’d like - I chose “Blog Sidebar”.
I now use this with multiple weblogs on every site I build, and the clients love them.
Posted by Jim in Tutorial/Tips · ExpressionEngine · (0) Comments