CoolDash – Blank Magento extension for building admin system configuration area
17 Comments 21st AUG 2009 | Posted by Branko Ajzele in Magento
In order to speed things up with building admin sections under System > Configuration area in Magento I wrote a little blank extension. Hopefully its a step or two beyond “Hello world” level. I named the extension “CoolDash”, short from CoolDashboard. Name holds no special meaning, just something I popped out of my head. First thing you might notice when you open config.xmls and system.xml is the attribute naming. I intentionally used names like “somecooldashmodel2″. I found it extremely difficult, error prone and annoying to get around in scenarios where different areas of config files use same names for attributes with different meaning, like “customer”, “catalog” and so on.
Hopefully my “funny” naming scheme in config files will give you a better overview on where everything goes. Below are few screenshots to see the result.
Download ActiveCodeline_CoolDash.Blank extension for building “System > Configuration” area of Magento admin interface. Although built on Magento 1.4alpha, should work on Magento 1.3.
Hope it helps.
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There are 17 comments (Add Yours +)
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August 21st, 2009 at 9:23
Hey Branko, nice work – thanks for sharing this. I agree that it can be a pain setting up the skeleton modules in Magento, so anything that automates the process slightly is great! It’s also very easy to not bother writing an admin module to interface with the config for a custom module, and instead obting to just hard code default values in your config.xml, so this will make me shift from doing that
August 24th, 2009 at 11:02
And here comes another of your timesavers (: I was just about to start writting a simple module for setting up all JS vars for 1.3 so I’m going to give it a go. Thanks a lot! (again…)
August 24th, 2009 at 18:47
It seems to work good, Thank you for this help!
Could you explain how to store datas and/or execute such a piece of code by pressing a button. In fact in one of a group, I’d like to generate an csv file when pressing a “generate” button.
August 26th, 2009 at 5:53
Thanks again for another helpful tool.
August 30th, 2009 at 14:25
Hi thank you for the sample.
I have an error saying “Access Denied” when I clicked on the Sample Section label. I’m using magento version 1.3
Any ideas guys on how to fix this one? Thanks in advance.
September 1st, 2009 at 7:33
If you get “Access Denied” using CoolDash, logout of Magento then log back in and try again.
September 4th, 2009 at 0:46
Thank you!
October 9th, 2009 at 8:37
You’re a lifesaver..
October 12th, 2009 at 4:17
Hi everyone,
I know you all are quite busy but being regular reader here just dared to ask for small help. Do you know how can i add new field in image gallery section? See the screenshot in magento forum at: http://www.magentocommerce.com/boards/viewthread/57761/
Due to this whole project is on hold
Thanks in advance.
October 12th, 2009 at 7:56
Hi Damodar,
Please see my latest article (wrote it last night) http://activecodeline.com/color-switcher-improved-for-magento-part-1.
It adds extra field to Image tab as you pointed out.
Hope it helps.
October 20th, 2009 at 14:28
Hi,
This is a amazing. I have to say, I have created a dummy module to use whenever I need to create a new module. But I did not know how to setup a module to be able to view configuration on the admin side. This is great.
Thanks a Bunch!
December 10th, 2009 at 22:33
Could you explain how to store datas and/or execute such a piece of code by pressing a button. In fact in one of a group, I’d like to generate an xml file when pressing a “generate” button.
January 5th, 2010 at 23:21
Could you explain how to add menu items to the Magento admin’s main navigation? It seems to me this process has changed in version 1.4, as normally you would place a node like … in your module’s config.xml file, but this no longer seems to work in 1.4
January 28th, 2010 at 8:37
Do you have a version of this that works on Magento ver. 1.6.0.0?? I have tried it and I keep getting Access denied; even if I log out and back in.
thanks
February 19th, 2010 at 18:12
Hi,
I have an error saying “Access Denied” when I clicked on the Sample Section label. I’m using magento version 1.4, i tried to logout and log back but i have always the same error.
Thanks
February 24th, 2010 at 18:59
Hello, to make it work with magento 1.4, if you have “access denied error” you must create a seperate ‘adminhtml.xml’ file for ACL node, in the same directory than config.xml and system.xml
Bye
March 9th, 2010 at 12:11
Guys, any idea how to get the new 1.4 TinyMCE editor to show on text areas in custom modules like this?