====== Chapter 3 - adding pages to the administration center ======

Now that pluck knows everything it has to know about our new module, we can start implementing our own pages in the administration center. First thing we need to do, is implement a **start page**.

===== Adding a start page =====
The **start page** of a module is the page that shows up after the user has clicked on your module in the administration center. So, if a module has a start page, this page will be linked to on the module page from the main menu.

Pluck inserts pages by including PHP-files. So, we created a PHP-file called //start.php// which contains the start page of our module. This file can contain of course any PHP-code you want. It's not needed to include html-start tags or things like that, pluck does that for you. It also doesn't matter what filename the file has; you'll see that later on in this chapter.

Ok, so now we have our start-page ready, we need to know how to include it in the administration center. Now we need to create another directory, called **pages_admin**. We'll create this directory inside our module-dir, so for our poll module it'll be **data/modules/polls/pages_admin/**. Pluck will search in this directory for files to include in the administration center. We want to include //start.php// in the administration center, so we put that file inside the directory (we then have **data/modules/polls/pages_admin/start.php**).

Ok, well done! Now we can tell pluck that it has to include //start.php// as the start page of our module. Therefore, we need to make a file called **module_pages_admin.php** in our module directory. So in our case, we create the file **data/modules/polls/module_pages_admin.php**.

Then we can use the variable //$startpage// to define the filename of our start page. So in our case, this will be the content of data/modules/polls/module_pages_admin.php:

<code php>
<?php
$startpage = "albums.php";
?>
</code>

If you now click on //modules// in the main menu of plucks administration center, you can see your module listed! The title of the module will be a link to it's start page.

<note tip>It's possible that your module doesn't need any pages implemented in the administration center (just like the contact form module). That's possible; just don't create a //module_pages_admin.php// file for your module.</note>

===== Adding more pages =====
Well, congratulations! You just included your first module page! But, most modules of course contain more than one page: our poll module for example, also needs a page for adding a new poll. How can we do that?

==== Adding the page ====
We already have a PHP-file that contains the code for the "new poll"-page we want to implement. This file is for example called //new_poll.php//, and we put it in our //pages_admin// directory.

Now, we need pluck to tell the file is there. You can use the following code to do this:
<code php>
$module_page['filename_without_extension'] = "title of the page";
</code>
  * **filename_without_extension** just is the filename of the page we want to implement (in our case //new_poll.php//), but without the extension. In our case, we need to fill in //new_poll// here.
  * You can replace **title of the page** with the title of the page you want to implement. Pluck will show this title on the top of the page.

In our case, we'll put the following code in //module_pages_admin.php//:
<code php>
$module_page['new_poll'] = "create a new poll";
</code>

==== Linking to the page ====
We know have inserted the page, but we don't know yet how we can access it. This is important to know, because we want to place a link to the "new poll"-page inside the start page of the module.

The URL of a module-page in the administration center will always look like this:
  admin.php?module=module_dir&page=filename_without_extension

  * **module_dir** is the same as the name of your module-dir, and also the same as the **$module_dir** variable inside //module_info.php// (for more information, see [[dev:modules:chapter_2|Chapter 2]]). In our case, this is //polls//.
  * **filename_without_extension** is the same filename without extension you put in //module_pages_admin.php//. In our case, this is //new_poll//.

So, the entire URL to access our "new poll"-page is:
  admin.php?module=polls&page=new_poll

We can link to the page like this:
<code html>
<a href="admin.php?module=polls&page=new_poll">create a new poll</a>
</code>

<note tip>The URL to the start page of a module will always look like this:
  admin.php?module=module_dir
So, in our case, it'll be:
  admin.php?module=polls
</note>

===== Resulting code =====
If we also implement some other pages, this could be an example of the resulting code in **module_pages_admin.php**:

<code php>
<?php
$startpage = "albums.php";
$module_page['new_poll'] = "create a new poll";
$module_page['del_poll'] = "delete poll";
$module_page['edit_poll'] = "edit a poll";
?>
</code>

===== Ok, let's go to the next chapter! =====
Let's go to the next chapter and learn how to add pages to the website! [[dev:modules:chapter_4|Go to the next chapter...]]