Advanced Settings

The Admin Menu > Advanced Settings page holds admin interface customizations and less commonly changed options. Settings are grouped into an Admin User Interface section and an Advanced Settings section.

While this page (or one of its related pages) is selected, extra links appear indented beneath Advanced Settings in the Admin Menu: Security Settings, Audit Log, and MCP Server. The same links are listed under See Also at the bottom of the page.

Admin User Interface

Customizes what admin users see when logged into the CMS Admin. These options don’t affect other users or the public website.

Admin Favicon: Displays a colored circle favicon in the browser tab so admins can easily distinguish between dev, staging, and live sites. Choose Default (the standard favicon), one of the preset Dev, Staging, or Live colors, or Custom with a color picker. Hovering over an option previews it in the browser tab.
Server Links: URLs for the Dev, Staging, and Live copies of the site, shown as quick-switch links below the program name in the Admin Menu. Each URL must start with http:// or https:// and end with .php (e.g., https://dev.example.com/cmsb/admin.php). Leave a field blank to hide that link. When server links are configured, the favicon color is set automatically based on the current hostname.
Admin Shortcuts: Shows admin shortcut icons on hover over menu links and page headings: a wrench icon to edit the section in the Database Editor, and a database icon for the MySQL Console (requires plugin).
Debug Footer: Adds a debug footer to the page source with execution time, memory usage, loaded files, and plugin hook activity. It is only visible to admin users via view-source. The toggle sets a browser cookie rather than a saved setting, so it applies per browser and takes effect without saving the page.

Advanced Settings

WYSIWYG Options

“Save full URL for local links and images (for viewers on other domains)”. When enabled, links and images inserted in WYSIWYG fields are stored with the full domain instead of a relative path, so content displays correctly when viewers run on a different domain than the CMS Admin.

Menu Options

“Always show expanded menu (don’t hide unselected menu groups)”. Keeps all Admin Menu groups expanded instead of collapsing unselected ones.

If a showExpandedMenu field has been added to the accounts section, this global option is ignored and the preference is set per user in User Accounts.

session.cookie_domain

“Share login session cookie with”: sets the domain scope of the login session cookie. The default, “current domain only”, limits logins to the exact hostname. The dropdown also offers wildcard options built from the current hostname (e.g., *.example.com) so a login session can be shared across subdomains.