For a long time I’ve wished that the EE2 control panel was a bit quicker to find your way around. The stuff I want to access always seems to be several clicks/pages away and I spend an inordinate amount of time bouncing from page A, to B, to C. Addons are particularly fiddly as you need to remember whether they’re extensions or plugins or modules. Looking up half-remembered field names takes too long. In theory the control panel search would be a great solution to this, but more often than not it returns no results at all. So I’ve built a new one.
Switchboard is a ‘live’ search engine that includes results for all of the key areas of your control panel. Instead of searching for control panel pages you search for the content you want to work with. Think of it as Spotlight for EE. Results include all of the links necessary to manage the content and are tailored to the active user’s permissions. If, for example, you search for a field name, then the results will include a link to edit or delete the field, a link to manage the field group and a button to copy the field name to your clipboard. Unlike the standard search engine you don’t need to enter exact terms - partial searches will work fine.
Currently Switchboard searches all of the following content:
Accessories
Categories
Channels
Channel Fields
Entries
Extensions
Field groups
Modules
Plugins
Templates
Template Groups
Switchboard also supports searching by URL, which means that it can be integrated with apps like Alfred and Launchbar. So not only do you not have to navigate through several pages to find what you’re after, you don’t even need to have your browser open to trigger a new search.
More info and a demo of Switchboard in action can be found on my site.