Develop

Pages

A page can contain any corporate related content, key metrics, news, help pages, custom reports, contact details, information about your server, forms to manage any data and anything else.

Creating a page

Creating a page means creating a controller and a Twig template.

You can use the console for this:

$ ./console generate:controller

The command will ask you to enter the name of your plugin and will create two files:

a Controller (plugins/MyPlugin/Controller.php)

class Controller extends \Piwik\Plugin\Controller
{
    public function index()
    {
        return $this->renderTemplate('index', array(
             'answerToLife' => 42
        ));
    }
}

The controller defines the view variable answerToLife and renders the Twig template.

a Twig template (plugins/MyPlugin/templates/index.twig)
```
{% extends 'dashboard.twig' %}

{% block content %}
    <strong>Hello world!</strong>
    <br/>

    The answer to life is {{ answerToLife }}
{% endblock %}
```
Variables passed by controllers can be used in views, like for example here: {{ answerToLife }}.

The template above is extending the dashboard template: the logo and the top menu will be included in your page.

Using a Twig template to generate your page is optional: you can also generate any content by returning a string in your controller action.

Now that your page is created, you can access it at the following URL: /index.php?module=MyPlugin&action=index&…. It should look like this:

Creating an admin page

If you would like to add the admin menu on the left you have to modify the following parts:

extend \Piwik\Plugin\ControllerAdmin instead of \Piwik\Plugin\Controller
extend the template admin.twig instead of dashboard.twig
define a headline using a <h2> element

{% extends 'admin.twig' %}

{% block content %}
    <h2>Hello world!</h2>
    <br/>

    The answer to life is {{ answerToLife }}
{% endblock %}

The result should look like this:

Note: if you just want to make your plugin configurable you should use the Plugin Settings instead.

What's next?

So far you have created a page but you can still not access it. To add it to one of the menus, keep on reading the Menus guide.

You can also read the following guides: