I’m going to interrupt my series of posts on my local development environment with a quick post on how to add your own tools to the ColdFusion administrative web application. This is probably old news to some people, but I just had a chance to play with this a couple days ago while checking out Ray Camden’s “Seeker” package from RIAForge.
In the code that Ray provides, there is a folder named “cfadmin”. The instructions say that these files “should be copied to your CFIDEadministrator folder in a new folder named seeker”, but did not provide any information on how to make the CF admin include these files in the navigation list. I poked around inside the /cfide/administrator folder under my ColdFusion root and found a file named “custommenu.xml”. That sounded exactly like what I wanted to do so I opened it up and found a nice set of instructions on the syntax required.
Essentially, once you build the actual CF files that will perform whatever functions you want (as Ray had already done with the files in the cfadmin folder in his zip file), you just have to make an entry into this XML file and ColdFusion will handle creating the nice expanding/collapsing menu creation for you. Once that’s done, your menu item(s) will look as if they shipped with the regular installation of ColdFusion administrator. Below is what I put in my custommenu.xml file to use Ray’s code:
<submenu label="Lucene Settings"> <menuitem href="seeker/index.cfm" target="content">Lucene Indices<menuitem></submenu>Once that was there I refreshed the CF administrator page I had open and the tool that Ray wrote to administer the Lucene indices popped right up.