This chapter will describe other APIs to be used by plugins.

Menu manager

Like in case of our training plugin, sometimes there is a neeed to alter default menu. Codice provides special class for that, so let's see how it might be used.

Remember that all plugins are in fact service providers? That also means they have app instance injected which we can utilize to resolve menu manager dependency from the container. Let's finally extend boot() method for our plugin.

public function boot()
{
    parent::boot();

    $m = $this->app->make('menu.main');
    $m->add('upcoming', 'Upcoming tasks', 'tasks', 6);
}

Apart from calling parent method we are using obtained menu manager instance and call add() method to create new link.

void Menu::add(string $route, string $name, string $icon, int $position = null, array $additionalRoutes = [])

$route
Route name we want link to.

$name
Display name for the menu item.

$icon
Class for one of the FontAwesome icons.

$position
Numeric position of the menu item. Priorites for default items are subsequent multiples of five so additional items can be placed between them. If ommited, priority will be highest registered priority + 1. Order of items with same priority is undefined.

$additionalRoutes
Optional array of routes which, apart from $route, should trigger .active class for the item.

Upcoming tasks plugin completed

And that's all! Our plugin should work just fine. If you performed every step correctly, you should be able to install the plugin from plugin manager (available from user menu). For the convenience you can find the complete plugin code in its GitHub repository.