A Control Panel’s Controller may contain the description of menu items that will be automatically output in all control panel sections (actions).

Here is an example of a menu in the users component settings:

The getBackendMenu() method returning an array of items should be defined in the controller (backend.php). Each item is represented by an array containing the following fields:

• title – item title
• url – URL

The href_to() helper function is used to form the URLs. The first parameter passes the controller name to it, the second – the action name to be referenced to. However, you should take this into account, because the URL of the control panel’s controller starts not from the root directory but from /admin/controllers/edit. There is a special property in the control panel’s controller:

$this->root_url

it contains an absolute path from the root directory. Hence, you can get the action’s URL in the following way:

href_to($this->root_url, 'action');

An example of a menu from the users component’s control panel (the code not related to the menu has been removed)

//system/controllers/users/backend.php
class backendUsers extends cmsBackend{
 
    public function getBackendMenu(){
        return array(
            array(
                'title' => LANG_USERS_CFG_FIELDS,
                'url' => href_to($this->root_url, 'fields')
            ),
            array(
                'title' => LANG_USERS_CFG_TABS,
                'url' => href_to($this->root_url, 'tabs')
            ),
            array(
                'title' => LANG_OPTIONS,
                'url' => href_to($this->root_url, 'options')
            ),
            array(
                'title' => LANG_PERMISSIONS,
                'url' => href_to($this->root_url, 'perms', 'users')
            ),
            array(
                'title' => LANG_USERS_CFG_MIGRATION,
                'url' => href_to($this->root_url, 'migrations')
            )
        );
    }
 
}

The screenshot above shows the result.

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