How to customise the CMS menu#

Adding an administration panel#

Every time you add a new extension of the LeftAndMain class to the CMS, Silverstripe CMS will automatically create a new CMSMenuItem for it

The most popular extension of LeftAndMain is a ModelAdmin class, so for a more detailed introduction to creating new ModelAdmin interfaces, read the ModelAdmin reference.

In this document we'll take the ProductAdmin class used in the ModelAdmin reference and so how we can change the menu behaviour by using the $menu_title and $menu_icon statics to provide a custom title and icon.

Defining a custom icon#

First we'll need a custom icon. For this purpose Silverstripe CMS uses 16x16 black-and-transparent PNG graphics. In this case we'll place the icon in app/images, but you are free to use any location.

namespace App\Admin;

use SilverStripe\Admin\ModelAdmin;

class ProductAdmin extends ModelAdmin
{
    // ...

    private static $menu_icon = 'app/images/product-icon.png';

    // ...
}

Defining a custom title#

The title of menu entries is configured through the $menu_title static. If its not defined, the CMS falls back to using the class name of the controller, removing the "Admin" bit at the end.

namespace App\Admin;

use SilverStripe\Admin\ModelAdmin;

class ProductAdmin extends ModelAdmin
{
    // ...

    private static $menu_title = 'My Custom Admin';

    // ...
}

In order to localize the menu title in different languages, use the <classname>.MENUTITLE entity name, which is automatically created when running the i18n text collection.

For more information on language and translations, please refer to the i18n docs.

Adding an external link to the menu#

On top of your administration windows, the menu can also have external links (e.g. to external reference). In this example, we're going to add a link to Google to the menu.

First, we need to define an Extension which will contain our button configuration.

namespace App\Admin;

use SilverStripe\Admin\CMSMenu;
use SilverStripe\Core\Extension;

class CustomLeftAndMain extends Extension
{
    // ...

    protected function onInit()
    {
        // unique identifier for this item. Will have an ID of Menu-$ID
        $id = 'LinkToExample';

        // your 'nice' title
        $title = 'Example Site';

        // the link you want to item to go to
        $link = 'https://www.example.com';

        // priority controls the ordering of the link in the stack. The
        // lower the number, the lower in the list
        $priority = -2;

        // Add your own attributes onto the link. In our case, we want to
        // open the link in a new window (not the original)
        $attributes = [
            'target' => '_blank',
        ];

        CMSMenu::add_link($id, $title, $link, $priority, $attributes);
    }
}

To have the link appear, make sure you add the extension to the LeftAndMain class. For more information about configuring extensions see the extensions reference.

LeftAndMain::add_extension('CustomLeftAndMain')

Customising the CMS help menu#

The CMS help menu links in the south toolbar are configurable via your configuration file. You can edit, add or remove existing links as shown in the examples below:

# app/_config/config.yml
SilverStripe\Admin\LeftAndMain:
  help_links:
    # Edit an existing link
    'CMS User help': 'https://www.example.com'
    # Add a new link
    'Additional link': 'https://example.org'
    # Remove an existing link
    'Feedback': ''

Customising the CMS form actions#

The Previous, Next and Add actions on the edit form are visible by default but can be hidden globally by adding the following .yml config:

SilverStripe\Forms\GridField\GridFieldDetailForm_ItemRequest:
  formActions:
    showPagination: false
    showAdd: false

You can also override this for a specific GridField instance when using the GridFieldConfig_RecordEditor constructor:

$grid = GridField::create(
    'pages',
    'All Pages',
    SiteTree::get(),
    GridFieldConfig_RecordEditor::create(null, false, false)
);

Related#

• How to extend the CMS interface