Control Panel

The Control Panel is the first screen after you sign in to /administrator. The component behind it, com_cpanel, holds no data and has no settings: it draws a stack of collapsible panels, one for each administrator module published in the cpanel position, and nothing else. What your dashboard shows is therefore a question about modules, not about this component.

That matters more than it sounds. A fresh install publishes exactly two modules in the cpanel position — Popular Articles and Recently Added Articles, both listing articles — so the first screen a new manager sees is two lists about a content type most hubs barely use. It is not broken and it is not hiding anything. It is simply the position's shipped contents, and you are free to replace them.

Daily maintenance describes the panels themselves — what each one counts and where its numbers link to. This chapter covers the component and how you change what appears.

What it is not

The Control Panel is not the hub's front page, and nothing published here is visible to a member. It is not a settings screen either: there is nothing on it to configure, and every number on it comes from a module that could be unpublished without affecting the hub. If your dashboard looks wrong, the thing to fix is a module.

What it renders

The component has one screen and five files. Its layout, views/cpanel/tmpl/default.php, asks the module loader for everything published in the cpanel position, renders each one, and wraps it in a slider panel — the loop is quoted in Daily maintenance. The open or closed state of each panel is remembered in a cookie, per administrator.

The Control Panel is also the fallback screen for the whole administrator interface. A request to /administrator with no option lands here, and every component's Cancel returns here when it has nowhere better to go.

Changing what appears

The panels are ordinary administrator modules, so they are managed from Extensions → Module Manager:

1. Open Extensions → Module Manager.
2. Set the Client filter to Administrator. Administrator modules are invisible while the filter is on Site, and so are the positions they can occupy.
3. To add a panel, press New, choose the module type, and set its Position to cpanel. To remove one, either unpublish it or move it to another position.
4. Ordering decides the order of the panels down the page.
5. Access decides which administrators see it. A panel is only as visible as the viewing level on its module.

Modules covers the Module Manager itself.

A module published in cpanel needs nothing special: any administrator module works there, including a Custom HTML module, which is the simplest way to put a hub's own notice or link list on the dashboard.

Putting a hub's own notice on the dashboard

Say the hub has three people who take turns in the administrator interface and you want the on-call number and the link to the ticket queue in front of them. That is a Custom HTML module:

1. Extensions → Module Manager, Client filter set to Administrator.
2. New, then choose Custom HTML.
3. Give it a Title — this one is worth typing carefully, because Custom HTML has no automatic title, so what you type is the panel heading.
4. Write the notice in the editor.
5. Set Position to cpanel, Ordering to put it above or below the article panels, and Status to Published.
6. Set Access to the viewing level every administrator holds. The two shipped panels use Special; matching them is the safe choice.
7. Save & Close, then open /administrator to see it.

Everything here is reversible. Unpublishing the module removes the panel and nothing else, and no member ever saw it either way.

Panel headings

The heading on a panel is the module's Title as you typed it in the Module Manager — unless the module's Automatic Title option is set, in which case the module supplies its own heading. Both modules a fresh install publishes here have that option set, so their headings read Popular Articles and Recently Created Articles whatever you call the modules. The second is worth knowing about before you go looking for a module named after the heading: the row is called Recently Added Articles in the Module Manager.

Permissions and options

There are none. The component ships no config.xml and no access.xml, so it has no Options button and no permission rules of its own, and its entry point performs no access check — reaching the administrator interface at all is the only gate. Who sees which panel is decided by each module's Access setting.