USING V1.33 + MENU ENHANCEMENTS - Aug 2nd, 2010

These are some really cool enhancements, but it took a bit of playing around to really get the picture. The first thing that you’ll notice when you upgrade (or install) to v1.33 or above is that when you click on Admin, instead of an Admin home page that lists all of your admin options, you’ll see an accordion style menu. When you click on one of these options you’ll get to the associated admin function. Cool you say, but how do I create one of these for my users? Enter Menu Groups: Lets say that you’ve got a series of product categories and each one has it’s own section editor. Up to now, no matter whether you’re client is thinking of updating one of these products or not, they will see the whole list of product section editors and may have to scroll past them to find the editor that they really want to modify. 1) log in as Admin, 2) click on the “Admin” menu group and then on “section editors”. 3) click on “Add New Editor” (a bit counterintuitive, but it works nonetheless. 4) Instead of creating a new editor, click on the “Advanced Menus” pull down and choose “Menu Group”. 5) Enter the group name you want into the “Menu Name” field. 6) click on “Create New Menu” and the group heading will appear in your section editor list. Now here’s the best part. Any existing section editors that are below this heading in the list, (and before the next Group Menu) will automatically become part of this group, and when you click on the group heading the group will expand and show its members. Even better, any other expanded group will collapse, so there’s less clutter to confuse a user. If you combine this ability with the “Indent on menubar” option on the section editor’s “modify” page (which does exactly what is says) and “Separator” fields that you can add to any section editor, you can really get some serious organization going. Now, how about Text Links”. To quote Dave Edis::” You can now add text links to the menu bar that link to external sites or any url. This makes it easier to provide links to other applications or services your clients might need and more tightly integrate your system with CMSB. This is great for adding links back to your company website (for your clients), your support page, and links to any other control panels or web applications the client might need to access. So how do I do this? Really simply. 1) As you did with the Group Menus, go to “Add New Editor”, click on the “Advanced Menus” pull down but this time choose “Text Link”. 2) In the “Menu Name” field enter the words that you want to appear on the item in the menu list. You could choose Help with Products, Go to my Web Site, or whatever you want. 3) When you click on “Create New Menu” the text link will appear in your section editor list. 4) Click on “Modify” and enter the URL that you want the link to lead to. 5) Save and then just as you would with other section editors, drag the link item in the section editor list to where you want it to appear in the menu. The difference is that when you click on the menu item, it will open the URL that you specified in a new browser window. So, now you can create as many “context sensitive” links for your clients as you like.

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