Creating Custom Admin Modules & Views
Monday 18 April 2011 2:42:34 pm
In this tutorial we will explore how to add custom modules and views to the CMS. By doing this you can extend the functionality of the back office to use your custom PHP to carry out various tasks. Once this tutorial is complete you should be comfortable with creating modules and views for any siteaccess with the CMS and be able to appreciate situations when creating custom modules and views would be suitable.
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Introduction
Adding your own tabs and functionality to the CMS is essential for some projects. This enables you to isolate functionality for authorised users and embed this functionality into the admin interface they are already familiar with. This tutorial will cover the basics for creating CMS based views and modules which you can use as a basis for your own admin based functionality.
We will setup several an extension for a simple mailing list .We will create the functionality to list the relevant users, remove them from the list and sending a simple, text based email to them.
Please note there are already several extensions you can embed for setting up newsletters in eZ Publish so I’d recommend looking into these rather than building your own from scratch straight away.
There is already a tutorial available on the site if you want to explore creating modules for the front of your site. I would also recommend reading this to get a thorough understanding of how modules and views are created (click here to view).
Pre-requisites and target population
This tutorial is for users who are comfortable with the eZ Publish template language and PHP and wish to extend the CMS for their own projects. Users should also be familiar with the structure of ini files used by eZ Publish and the layout of the admin site access of a basic eZ Publish site.
This tutorial has been developed using eZ Publish 4.4 but some code examples require slightly different code to work on all versions of 4.x. Where this is the case alternative code is supplied and its use noted.