Adding new panel sections

Panel sections are used to group panels together. The default panel sections are top, main, and bottom.

We can create custom panel sections if we have the need to have new separate groups of panels.

Creating a new panel section

Say we have an online store and we would like to have a number of custom store related panels. We would like to create a panel section to group these store related panels together.

First we create a dashboard-custom folder in our root directory to house our custom dashboard code. To enable the dashboard-custom directory to be picked up by Silverstripe we must create a _config directory inside dashboard-custom.

Next we create a new PHP file StoreDashboardPanelSection.php in dashboard-custom/src/PanelSections/. In our dashboard-custom/src/PanelSections/StoreDashboardPanelSection.php file we create a RecentlyEditedPropertiesPanel class, which extends DashboardPanel:

<?php

use Plastyk\Dashboard\Model\DashboardPanelSection;

class StoreDashboardPanelSection extends DashboardPanelSection
{
    private static $section = 'store';
    private static $sort = 5;
}

In our StoreSection class we have a section and a sort variable.

• section defines the section name that will be used to associate panels to this section.
• sort sets the sort order of the panel section. In this example we have set it to 5, which will be below the top section (sort order 0) and above the main section (sort order 50).

To add a panel to this section, we simply need to set the section variable in our custom panel classes.

For example, say we have the following custom dashboard panel classes:

<?php

use Plastyk\Dashboard\Model\DashboardPanel;

class RecentOrdersPanel extends DashboardPanel
{
    private static $section = 'store';
}

<?php

use Plastyk\Dashboard\Model\DashboardPanel;

class BestSellingProductsPanel extends DashboardPanel
{
    private static $section = 'store';
}

We then call ?flush=all in the browser URL to have the new section added and the panels added to this section.