Admin Bar 5.5 includes a new Search Admin Bar Widget, icons for custom links, and the ability to refresh the Blitz cache on the current page.
Admin Bar PRO has a new widget that lets you use Craft CMS’s built-in search to search for entries in the current site. If an entry that appears in search results has a page on your site it will link to the page URL. All search results will show an "Edit" button that will take you to the entry’s edit page (if that author has permission to edit that entry).
For pages that are cached by the Blitz plugin the Blitz Admin Bar Widget now shows a "Refresh Page" button. Clicking that button refreshes the cache for that page and then reloads the page so you can see the changes appear right away.
Admin Bar includes two ways to add your own links to Admin Bar:
- The Additional Links field on the Admin Bar plugin settings page.
- The
additionalLinksarray in anadmin-bar.phpconfig file.
On the Admin Bar plugin settings page you can now select an icon for each link using Craft CMS’s icon picker field. The icon will be shown before the link label, just like the other icons in Admin Bar.
In the config file, you can now set an icon property to the name of the SVG icon.
Admin Bar Talking to the CMS
In order to include the Search and Blitz page refresh features, a new plugin controller was added to Admin Bar. This controller handles receiving POST requests and returning data back to Admin Bar.
When a request is made from Admin Bar to the CMS a red line will appear across the bottom of Admin Bar. If the request is pending the line will go about halfway, then it will go the full width upon success.
If the line is changing colors then it means the request failed. You’ll see an error appear in your browser’s console (usually found in Developer Tools).
Admin Bar will try to respect site settings around things like the default search settings. Since these new features can be a little bit complicated, please reach out on GitHub if you run into any strange errors.
More Interactivity!
So far Admin Bar has been focused on providing information and links to the front-end, but adding the controller setup and all of its scaffolding will allow for some more interactivity with Craft CMS plugins through Admin Bar Widgets.
I have some ideas brewing, but I’m especially interested to hear what things you’d like to see come to Admin Bar.