HELP_developer.md

You can provide details about recent activity for other areas of your site, or for other extensions in your system.

Dashboard comes with regions that you may edit just like any other area of the Radiant interface.

For Extension Developers

Dashboard Regions

If you would like to provide some information about your extension to users but the information doesn't present the need for another tab in the main navigation of the admin area, you can easily add your information to the Dashboard instead.

Here's an example used by Site Watcher

	def activate
	if admin.respond_to?(:dashboard)
		admin.dashboard.index.add :extensions, 'popular_pages'
	end
end

Site Watcher adds Radius tags to the system to list popular pages on your public website. It's not necessary for the extension to list these pages for site editors, but it would be convenient. So Dashboard fills the gap of providing a small area to display information for Site Watcher when a main navigation tab would be unnecessary.

For another example of its use, see Featured Pages

Dashboard Helper

Dashboard comes with a simple helper to display the name of the user who most recently update a particular object. You may use updater_name_for(your_object)

By default the updater_name_for helper will find the name of the user listed as the updated_by_id. If that field is empty, it will find the user listed as the created_by_id. If that field is empty, it will display "Radiant System" as the updaters name.

If you need a more complex result, or if you would like to provide some other default result, you may user the associations, attribute, and not_found arguments:

updater_name_for(page, :associations => [:reviewed_by_id, :approved_by_id], :attribute => :login, :not_found => 'Nobody')

The updater_name_for method will loop through the :associations in the order that they are provided, if the association exists it will ask for the provided :attribute and if none of these are found it will display the :not_found argument.

The above example assumes a theoretical extension that adds the fields reviewed_by_id and approved_by_id to the pages table. If those fields are empty (or NULL) in the database, the result would be "Nobody"

If none of these are provided the default values will be [:updated_by, :created_by], :name and Radiant System.

CSS

Each default Dashboard module is defined in HTML as:

<div id="..." class="dashboard_module">
	<h2>...Title...</h2>
	<p>...optional message...</p>
	... your details...
</div>

If you would like to keep your modules up to date with the default CSS, be sure to use this structure and to include the class dashboard_module.