How to add a menu item to CKAN's naivigation menu?

Question

I want to make the functionality of a custom extension available via a menu item in the CKAN's main navigation menu. Not sure how I can add this new menu item from my extension code. Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks, PK

Answer 1

If you want to take advantage of CKAN's main navigation menu, it gets a little tricky. (We just had to figure this out. Not sure if we did it the right way, but we did get it to work with CKAN 2.2):

First, you need the additional content in your extension path somewhere. Assuming it's at my_extension/amazing.html, you want to add the following to the my_extension/templates/header.html file (in your custom extension):

{% ckan_extends %}

{% block header_site_navigation_tabs %}
  {{ h.build_nav_main(
    ('search', _('Datasets')),
    ('organizations_index', _('Organizations')),
    ('group_index', _('Groups')),
    ('about', _('About')),
    ('amazing', _('Amazing Extension'))
  ) }}
{% endblock %}

This will cause a server error, since "amazing" hasn't been registered in pylons as a mapped route. We'll fix that next. If you've built your extension properly, you should have a my_extension/plugins.py, to which you'll need to add the following to your plugin's class definition:

class AmazingPlugin(plugins.SingletonPlugin, tk.DefaultDatasetForm):
    #or
    plugins.implements(plugins.IRoutes, inherit=True)
    def before_map(self, m):
        m.connect('amazing', #name of path route
            '/amazing', #url to map path to
            controller='ckanext.my_extension.controller:AmazingController', #controller
            action='amazing') #controller action (method)
        return m

..where ckanext.my_extension.controller is the include path to my_extension/controller.py, which we'll create next. It should consist of:

import ckan.plugins as p
from ckan.lib.base import BaseController

class AmazingController(BaseController):
    def amazing(self):
        return p.toolkit.render('amazing.html')

That's it. Now you've got a controller mapping a url to a nav item that you can call with h.build_nav_main(). Simple, right? ;) One last thing. You'll need to restart apache for it to take effect.

Edit: there was a misspelling in the header.html part