Admin UI Tour

Blesta 6.0's admin UI is built on Bootstrap 5 and introduces several navigation surfaces that weren't present in 5.x. This page is an orientation for staff who are new to v6, or for 5.x users coming over.

• At a glance
• Top bar
• Icon Bar
  • Customizing your Icon Bar
• Sidebar (context-aware)
• Settings navigation
  • Filtering extension listings

At a glance

The 6.0 admin shell has four navigation surfaces:

Surface	Where	What it's for
Top bar	Across the top of every page	Logo, search, Pinned Notes, Quick Jump, notifications, user menu
Icon Bar	Vertical strip on the left	One-click access to the screens you visit most
Sidebar	Right of the Icon Bar (context-aware)	Page-specific navigation when relevant
Settings navigation	Inside Settings only	Two-pane settings tree with search and Company/System toggle

Top bar

The top bar carries the global search and most cross-cutting controls.

• Logo — branded by your Look and Feel configuration (separate light/dark variants in 6.0 — see Customizing the Layout). On narrow screens, the logo collapses to the icon-only variant.
• Search bar with Ctrl + K keyboard shortcut. The icon to the left of the search box opens a dropdown to pick what you're searching: smart search, clients, invoices, services, etc.
• Pinned Notes icon — appears on client-related pages when the client has sticky notes. The number badge shows the note count. Click to view the notes inline without leaving the current page.
• Quick Jump icon — when enabled, opens a dropdown to jump to a recently viewed client or other entity without going through the full search flow.
• Notifications bell — shows the unread notification count. Click to see recent notifications and mark them as read. See Notifications.
• User menu (your name in the top right) — links to My Info, Notifications preferences, Icon Bar customization, and Log Out.

Icon Bar

The Icon Bar is the vertical strip on the left side of every admin page. It's split into two regions:

• Top region — icons for major sections like Clients, Billing, Packages, Tools, etc. These appear in the order you configure.
• Bottom region — Settings (gear), the AI Chatbot icon (when enabled), and any custom icons you've added.

Hovering an icon shows its label; clicking opens that section. The current section's icon is highlighted.

Customizing your Icon Bar

Each staff member has their own Icon Bar configuration. To customize yours:

1. Click your name in the top-right, then My Info > Icon Bar (or the Icon Bar entry in the user menu).
2. Drag icons up and down to reorder them.
3. Check or uncheck icons to enable or disable them.
4. Click the edit button on an existing icon to change its icon (Bootstrap Icons class) or destination URL.
5. Click Create Custom Icon to add a new icon. Fill in Name, URL, and a Bootstrap Icons class (e.g. bi-grid, bi-people, bi-calendar-event). Use Browse icons in the dialog if you need to look up a class name.
6. Click Save Changes to persist your layout.

To start over, click Reset to Default and confirm. The Show Chatbot Icon checkbox controls whether the AI chatbot icon appears in your Icon Bar regardless of the company-level chatbot configuration — uncheck it if you have access but don't use the feature.

Sidebar (context-aware)

The sidebar to the right of the Icon Bar shows page-specific navigation when relevant. For example, on a client profile page it shows sections for Services, Invoices, Transactions, etc. The sidebar collapses on narrow screens.

There's nothing to configure here — it changes based on the page you're viewing.

Settings navigation

Settings has its own two-pane layout, redesigned in 6.0:

• Search box at the top — filter the settings tree by keyword. Matches against both the displayed setting name and the underlying metadata (data-search-keywords, data-search-description) — so searching for "tax" finds settings related to taxation even when the heading uses a different word.
• Company / System toggle — switch between Company settings (per-company configuration like emails, gateways, modules) and System settings (installation-wide configuration like staff, AI, license).
• Icon-labelled settings list — every entry has a Bootstrap Icon for faster visual scanning. Group headers cluster related settings together.

Within a settings page itself, the previously-active link remains highlighted as you drill into secondary views (e.g. an Add or Edit form) so you can find your way back without retracing.

Filtering extension listings

The Gateways, Modules, and Plugins list pages under Settings each have a filter field at the top of the listing (placeholder: "Filter plugins...", "Filter gateways...", etc.). Type to narrow the list as you go — useful when you have many installed extensions and want to find one quickly. If your filter matches nothing, the listing shows a "No matching items found" message.

The per-row column previously labelled Options is now labelled Actions for consistency with the rest of the admin UI. The buttons it contains (Manage, Uninstall, etc.) are unchanged.