CoolDash – Blank Magento extension for building admin system configuration area

14 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.

There are 14 comments (Add Yours +)

Mike Whitby Says
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
Marek Says
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…)
JpBauer Says
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.
Erik Hansen Says
August 26th, 2009 at 5:53

Thanks again for another helpful tool.
Bryan Houghton II Says
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.
chris le Says
September 1st, 2009 at 7:33

If you get “Access Denied” using CoolDash, logout of Magento then log back in and try again.
Dumbrava Razvan Aurel Says
September 4th, 2009 at 0:46

Thank you!
K Says
October 9th, 2009 at 8:37

You’re a lifesaver..
Damodar Bashyal Says
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.
Branko Ajzele Says
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.
Cool Moov Says
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!
mika Says
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.
Nick Says
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
munyah Says
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