Site Administration Control Panel Categories in the Product Menu

2020-04-15T01:58:15Z

It seems we have come across a convention that might be helpful for others to know about. When building a custom category for the Product Menu, we ran into a snag whereby the scope group path was getting lost when going from portlets in the site admin section to portlets in the Control Panel section and back. This was annoying as one would have to click on the "Go To Site" link in the Product Menu to reset their 'state' and get the portlets in the custom category to use the scope that was selected.

This manifested and became obvious when we realized we would see the links for site builder and content sections use the `/group/guest/~/control_panel` form of the URL but the links in our custom admin panel portlets ended up using the `/group/control_panel/manage` version of the url.

We could not figure out what was driving the desired behaviour of those links in the Site Builder and the Content and Data categories until we discovered this nugget of code in the BasePanelApp implementation class that seems to be expecting the category key to start with `site_administration. ` (with a dot as defined in the PortletCategoryKey Constants Class) in order to trigger the right logic so the Group Provider is used to build the right URL for the portlets in the panel.

By choosing a Category key string that starts with `site_administration.` all of our troubles were resolved. It would be awesome if a little more clarification to this end is documented in the overview of creating custom Control Panel Categories that is provided here.

Hope this helps somebody else along the way.