Deploying Add Ons to Clients?

Question

Is there a good way to handle giving your clients easy access to an Add-On? For example, I'm using Low Variable to allow a client to edit their homepage content. But as far as I can tell in order for them to do that I have to give them access to Add-Ons and Modules, which they have to click through to get to Low Variables. I wish I could just give them single-click access directly to Low Variables.

In the past, I've added a custom tab to the CP for this kind of thing (which even lets me give it a better name like "Edit Homepage"), but that really doesn't scale well since it requires logging in as each member one at a time, and you have to remember to do it every time you add a new member. I'd probably just keep doing this anyway if it didn't require also making the Add-Ons tab visible anyway.

Any suggestions? How does everyone else handle this? Any way to hide the Add-Ons tab?

Answer 1

Adding a custom CP navigation tab is the best way to do it. But as you said it is tedious to log in as each individual user and manually create the link. There are two add-ons that will enable you to do it on a per-member-group basis.

1) Member Group Tabs

This extension allows you to create navigation tabs for entire member groups in the ExpressionEngine control panel.

OR

2) Zoo Flexible Admin

Zoo Flexible Admin lets you fully customize the control panel menu per membergroup. Insert custom links, rename, re-order and remove menu items in order to create a more intuitive menu.

Zoo Flexible Admin is really powerful, giving you complete control of the CP navigation per member group. So if you did want to hide the Add-Ons tab as you described, this would be the way to go.

Answer 2

Zoo Flexible Admin is stellar, as the others have said; if you're using Structure, the "Encaf Where is the LV?" add-on is also a good alternative.