Esther E.

By now you might be getting a little tired of hearing about our UI Extensions, but we still have a few more features to talk about. We showed you how to add CSS and data attributes to content. We discussed how to add form fields and menu items. In this final entry on this tool, we'll talk about working with Nodes. ACP Tools Nodes are different than the Items and Comments, as they are typically managed in the ACP and not on the front-end. Therefore, we needed additional extension methods to allow developers to handle custom actions. Let's take a look at Nodes in the ACP. There are a few areas where developers may need to insert custom logic. The UINode extension includes the following methods: rowButtons Returns an array of action buttons that will be added to the control strip on the right. This method functions identically to the Model::getButtons() method. rowHtml Inserts custom HTML to the left of the control strip. rowBadge If a badge should be displayed, return an array with the CSS class and language string. Note that anything defined in the base class get__badge() method will take precedence over your extension. No Entry It is important to note that not all Node classes support the form-related methods. We have of course added support for all content containers, such as Forums and Calendars. We will consider including support for other classes upon request, however, nodes that handle infrastructure (e.g. Theme, Lang) will not be supported. We have also locked down some system-level classes (not all) where any extension is potentially destructive. Classes such as Application and Module cannot be extended. OK, so what CAN I still do? AMA (well, almost anything). We still have a few more tools to show you, but at this point we'd like to hear from you. We know there is still a lot of uncertainty around how to migrate your modifications from v4 to v5, and we're here to assist with that. Send us your questions or use-cases by submitting a topic here. Please note that this is a private forum; you will not see topics posted by others, so you are free to share code samples if necessary. We will review your questions, and then aggregate them into an FAQ. The deadline for your question to be considered for the FAQ is September 1. After that you may still submit questions in the Contributor forum, where we will do our best to respond.

In our previous blog entry, we described the UI Extension and its overall capabilities. Today, we'll talk about how to use this new tool to extend content forms and menus. Form Fields A popular modification request is to add fields to a Content Item, such as a Topic. All UI extension classes contain the following methods: formElements Returns an array of form elements that will be added to the form. Note: Unlike other UI Extension methods, the first parameter of this method can be NULL, if you are creating a new item. formPostSave Allows you to process the fields that were added in the formElements method. Note that this method is triggered after the form is saved. Note: This method has the same function as the ContentListener method onCreateOrEdit, but we've added support for it here as well to avoid the creation of multiple classes, and to keep related code in the same place. Element Placement By default, all new form elements will be inserted at the end of the form. However, there are times that you may want to insert your fields into specific positions within the form. You can use the new FormAbstract::setPosition() method to specify where the element should be inserted. Let's look at an example. public function formElements( ?BaseItem $item, ?Model $container ): array { return [ 'my_new_field' => new Text( 'my_new_field', $item ? $item->new_field : null, true ) ]; } The above will append a Text field called "my_new_field" at the end of the Topic form. public function formElements( ?BaseItem $item, ?Model $container ): array { $field = new Text( 'my_new_field', null, true ); return [ 'my_new_field' => $field->setPosition( Topic::$formLangPrefix . 'tags', Topic::$formLangPrefix . 'mainTab' ) ]; } By using setPosition, I've placed the new field after the "tags" field, on the main tab in the form. Extending Content Menus In this blog entry, we introduced our new approach to building menus. With UI extensions, you can add your own items to Item and Comment menus using the following methods: UIItem::menuItems UIComment::menuItems We will discuss nodes and their menus in a future blog entry. Extending Item Badges Similarly, you can use the UI Extension to add badges to the item header. The UIItem::badges() method returns an array of badges and/or icons to be appended to the badge display. This concludes our discussion of UI Extension features related to Items and Comments. In our next blog entry, we'll discuss Nodes and what additional methods are available.