Modifying the admin interface [SOLVED]

[palun]

Hi all,

Is there a good description somewhere of how to modify the admin interface according to user category?

I am aware of the "Group permissions" panel (in menu "Users & Groups"), which is good, but doesn't allow for much detail (essentially only allows for hiding/showing panels).

But what if I want to change the label for one of the fields in a panel? Or if I want to disable/hide a certain field for a category of users?

An example: For a certain type of pages the content area ({content}) is used for displaying news and nothing else. So the content of that area in the admin panel would be something like:
{news number="3" summarytemplate="mynewstemplate" category="General"}  
Since only an admin should be allowed to change this, I want to hide/disable the area for editors, designers etc. How can I do this? (I thought of CSS, obviously, but the fields don't have id's or classes that I can use.)

Another example: I want to to add an explanatory text to an admin panel, or to a particular field label in a panel. How do I do that? (Preferrably without having to worry about future updates of CMSMS overwriting my modifications.)

There may be very obvious solutions to these questions (and, as always, I am afraid of the flames..). I have searched, promise. And I have tried to learn. But I cannot come up with anything useful in this case. Please help.

Many thanks!
/ulf (who is not a PHP programmer)

[RonnyK]

Hi,

if a page is NOT to be modified by certain people, than make sure that those people dont have the 'Manage All Content' and 'Modify Any Page' permission.

Without those two permissions, they are only allowed to modify pages, of which they are 'owner' or 'additional editor'.

For changing the label of a certain field/module etc...

Create a file called,
admin\custom\lang\en_US\admin.inc.php

with content like..

Then that will be translated like this, advantage is that it is NOT hindering the upgrade.

Same goes for other modules, then it is like...

module_custom\MenuManager\lang\en_US.php

Ronny

[palun]

Thanks RonnyK!

But what about hiding/disabling a particular field (say Content, or a custom content block) in an admin panel? ('Manage All Content' and 'Modify Any Page' only controls access to whole pages, right?)

I knew about the lang-files, so that part was stupid of me to ask (don't know why I did that, sorry). But: is there a simple way of adding a general help-text for the whole of an admin panel? (That would require digging into the admin theme, right?)

/ulf

[NaN]

You can try AdvancedContent module.
There you can define what contentblock may be edited by what user/group.

To add a label to a contentblock use the param "label":

{content label="Your label here"}

In AdvancedContent there additionally is a param "description" to give some more details to a certain contentblock:

{content label="Your label here" description="Some more than a label"}


To add something in the backend in general that isn't there by default you will need to modify the backend theme.

[palun]

Thanks NaN!
That's exactly what I was looking for.
Much appreciated!