As I mentioned the other day when discussing login and registration pages in Orchard Core CMS, I am updating a number of my Orchard Core Themes with new features in the latest version of Orchard Core. There is no secret to doing this, our best guide are the themes that come bundled with Orchard Core: The Agency Theme, The Blog Theme, and The Coming Soon Theme. One of the new features I saw in The Blog Theme and its setup recipe is use of the Admin Menus module to add custom menu items to Orchard Core's Dashboard. Love it! Any custom Orchard Core CMS Theme worth its salt should have a covenient link to the Main Menu as well as other major functionality, like blog, FAQ, store, etc.
As an example, I changed the setup recipe and a custom recipe for one of my custom Orchard Core themes, called arete. The setup recipe adds the Main Menu admin menu item, and a custom recipe in the theme, called Create a Blog, creates the Blog admin menu item. It's a simple change for sure, but extremely convenient and a nice touch!
When I take a peek at the Admin Menus for the Orchard Core CMS Website, there are two Admin Menus as we would expect, one for the setup recipe, which creates the Main Menu admin menu item, and one for the custom recipe, that creates the blog admin menu item. I intentionally separated the functionality into 2 separate recipes, but if you look at The Blog Theme that ships with Orchard Core CMS, the main menu and blog admin menu items are both created in the setup recipe. I wanted the separation of concerns, but it is all based on the needs of your Orchard Core CMS Website and theme.
One can get pretty fancy with admin menus for Orchard Core CMS themes and recipes, but in this case I just need to link to existing content items created in the recipes. In my custom Orchard Core Blog recipe, for example, I just create a link menu item to the blog that was built as part of the recipe. I had to crop some of the image to make it easier to see in this blog post, but this is essentially what the custom admin menu item link looks like as created by my custom Orchard Core CMS Theme's blog recipe.
Very slick! Love the Admin Menus module in Orchard Core CMS and love the fact that I can create custom admin menus as part of the setup recipe or custom recipe! If you're a professional Orchard Core CMS Developer like myself who develops custom themes, creating custom admin menu items in your setup recipes or custom recipes as appropriate is a great idea. I really enjoy developing Orchard Core themes and making them feature-rich for my clients, and adding custom Admin Menu items adds a wonderful touch.
Hope this helps. I'll be writing more tutorials and tips on Orchard Core CMS so stay tuned!